Somebody sees somebody else out the window of a Mazda 5 and they make eye contact. Somebody is named Johnny. Somebody else is named Fuckwad. Fuckwad is behind one of those big wooden rectangular planters that expensive cafés put on the street. It’s filled with fat, ugly, jade plants. Fuckwad is wearing a black shirt, black skinny jeans, and a black cape. His hair is long and ratty. Johnny looks at Fuckwad, and Fuckwad looks up from whatever he’s doing and looks so closely at Johnny’s eyes that Johnny thinks he’s going to be sick. The Mazda 5, gray, keeps on keeping on, one of Johnny’s friends’ moms is driving it. The friend is named Milan. Milan and his mom don’t notice Fuckwad. Johnny closes his eyes really hard. We’ll see him again in just a little while, I think.
Johnny thinks Fuckwad is high on meth. Fuckwad probably is high on meth, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyone can ingest meth in all kinds of ways. The fact of ingesting meth in America in 2024 is so rote that it completely fails to confer identity onto Fuckwad or anybody else. Most meth heads in the midwestern college town that Fuckwad and Johnny and approximately 19,998 other people live in are living totally normal lives with jobs and girlfriends and tickets to college football games. Fuckwad was crouching behind ugly houseplant displays way before he had ever tried meth. He has enough money to buy the clothes he wants and for two meals a day, one at McDonalds and one from one of the decent restaurants that the college students go to. He does “odd jobs,” which usually means letting some big dude fuck him and hit him and stuff but sometimes means lifting heavy things and occasionally means fucking and hitting some big dude. The name Fuckwad is his name because it’s what people call him. There’s another name that his mom uses when she’s on the telephone, but nobody else in the whole world knows it. Fuckwad is a good name, it sounds like it could be Arabic, a terrorist name. When he was a kid, he watched a lot of videos of terrorists on the internet or wished he did.
Poison is something everybody needs.
Friends of Fuckwad’s have boring names like Tim and Bob and Fred and Pete, all monosyllabic, and they call Fuckwad a third name, which is a special code by which they tell Fuckwad that they love him or whatever. Their secret loving code name is Small, because Fuckwad is small. He doesn’t keep track of their names because they’re one big group, his posse. A guy who could be named Will is lying behind the ugly plants with Fuckwad. Will says, “Hey, Small, do we have any more whiskey?” Fuckwad passes Will the rest of the whiskey and feels loved. Whiskey sloshes over beard, pavement. It’s so sparkling gold, and the pavement is so pale gray. Fuckwad hates that the color they make together is dark and nasty. Wet pavement is nasty. The guy who’s probably Will licks the pavement and sucks on it, his lips pressed flat into a wide red oval.
They are in front of a café named Hideout. Hideout is Fuckwad’s hideout. It’s owned by his best friend, who is probably named Clark. Clark likes to have guys like Fuckwad around because it makes sure there won’t be any other customers. He’s trying to run himself out of business so he can kill himself. But there are too many college students and not enough coffee shops, kids step over and around Fuckwad and the rest of his posse, earn Clark just enough money that he can’t justify the sleeping pills. Hideout is about to close for the day, so Clark grabs Will and pulls him inside, and Fuckwad follows them. “Get the door, Small,” says Clark, and Fuckwad locks the door. As he’s turning the lock he turns the open sign around quickly, “closed” now faces everyone outside, and everything is open to Fuckwad. Two other guys are there, plus Clark and Will. Will puts on a rap album and they do drugs. Fuckwad’s posse is pretty boring. They’ll still be here when we get back.
Two blocks away is the college library, which is the only beautiful building in the whole town. It is beautiful because a very rich person had a son of below average intelligence who really liked libraries. The very rich person decided to build a perfect library for whatever college his brain-dead son could get into. They don’t matter at all, the son died young, his dad died old. But the library is still there; it looks science fiction, tan stone and big convex windows. It also is science fiction, because it can talk. It can always talk but chooses not to while college is in session because it doesn’t like crowds. Its name is Bethany. Right now, it’s talking to a woman, Amalia. Amalia is a librarian. She, like everybody else, doesn’t believe that Bethany can actually talk. Everybody explains it to themself differently. Amalia’s explanation is simple: Bethany is the voice in her head. Most people have toxic, antagonistic, or tragic relationships with the voices in their head, but Bethany is Amalia’s best friend. Amalia would surely be touched if she knew that she was Bethany’s best friend as well. Amalia tells Bethany about all of the things that Bethany will never be able to see. Amalia is telling Bethany about pillories. She is reading from the encyclopedia that she keeps under her desk: “In the statutes of Edward I of England, it was enacted that every pillory or ‘stretch-neck’ should be made strong enough to hold offenders without peril to their bodies. It was customary in the case of men sentenced to the pillory to shave the head and beard wholly or partially; the hair of female culprits was cut off, and in extreme cases the head was shaved.”
Bethany asks if Amalia has ever seen someone pilloried. Amalia says, “I’m not old enough,” and then checks to make sure that’s true. It is true. Nobody alive is old enough to have seen someone pilloried because nobody has been pilloried since 1830. At least, nobody that any encyclopedia knows of. “Maybe at a Renaissance fair,” says Amalia. Bethany asks what a Renaissance is. This is how the days go for the two of them. Bethany, for a talking library, is very dull. It has too many questions and no opinions. It lacks deductive reasoning, and it’s a poor conversationalist. Amalia is the only one who can really put up with it. Amalia loves talking to Bethany because conversations with anyone else are too much for her.
The main person Amalia speaks to besides Bethany is Mia, her granddaughter. Mia’s parents are dead, Amalia can’t remember how. She can’t even remember which of Mia’s parents was her child. Whichever one it was, she’s glad they’re dead, and she wishes Mia would join them. Mia is not in the library. She never has and never will step foot inside of Bethany. Mia is at summer camp, which at sixteen she feels she should be exempt from. Amalia knows better though. She knows that if she lets Mia roam free unsupervised, she will humiliate Amalia in a number of ways. She knows this because Mia already humiliates Amalia. She dyes her hair, sleeps with women, swears in public, plays the drums. A woman at church called Mia a devil. Amalia doesn’t love Mia because to love a devil you would have to be a devil. Amalia is not a devil, she’s a librarian. “Do you want to hear about other kinds of corporal punishment?” she asks Bethany, who does.
The summer camp Mia is at is called Camp Ojibwe. At Camp Ojibwe, kids used to paint their faces like Indians and build teepees, but now they’re not allowed to because an Indian woman called the mayor and complained. The people in charge don’t know how to do anything except for paint faces and build teepees, so now they just let the campers fuck around in the woods. Mia’s girlfriend meets her there every day at 9 a.m. They hike to a big cave. The hike takes about an hour. This is their cave, they think of it as their house, they hung a beaded curtain on the entrance and furnished it with two wooden chairs and an ugly off-white rug that Mia’s girlfriend found on the side of a street somewhere. They never sit on the chairs. Sometimes they fuck on the rug. Sometimes they just sit on it, read, talk, whatever. Either way, Mia plays music off of her phone. Today she’s playing Unwound, and they’re fucking. Mia’s face is deep in her girlfriend’s pussy. She’s moving her tongue in heavy upward thrusts, pushing into and past her girlfriend’s clitoris just like she would push through their beaded curtain. The music stops, Mia’s phone rings. In big letters it says MILAN 🇮🇹. Mia presses the power button to decline the call. She puts her face back between her girlfriend’s thighs. Ten seconds of “Envelope” echo through their little cave (“She won’t miss you . . .”). MILAN 🇮🇹calls again.
“Yes . . . Dude, I’m busy . . . I’m getting laid . . . You better bring us something to drink . . . Fuck you.” Mia hangs up. She says, “My cousin is coming over,” like that wasn’t obvious.
“I’m not scared . . . to stay alone inside a sealed envelope!” says her phone speaker.
Milan is giving his mom directions. She is doing everything he says because he doesn’t have any friends. Johnny is the first thing resembling a friend that Milan’s mom has seen since his age was in single digits. For the last six years of his life, Milan has either hung around Mia or sat alone with his hood over his eyes like a school shooter. Once his mom got a call from the high school because some asshole kid told the principal that Milan was threatening to bring a gun to school. The principal believed it very easily. And so: Johnny is a superstar, Milan is his agent, and she is their limo driver. Anything they need. Milan directs her to a liquor store where she buys them thirty fluid ounces of Jose Cuervo. Then Milan directs her to a small path into a prairie. “Call me when you boys need a ride home,” she says. At the liquor store she also bought one of those tiny plastic bottles of Jim Beam. She downs it, winks, and drives away. The performance doesn’t make Milan feel any type of way at all.
Johnny follows Milan as he walks into the prairie and then makes a left. The left leads them up a small hill and then down into the woods. He takes another left, off the path, and eventually finds a small cave with a purple beaded curtain hanging at its entrance. Jose Cuervo leads them into the cave. Mia’s phone says, “Hex on you, what a shame.” Mia’s girlfriend says, “Tequila.” Mia says, “What’s up, Milan.” Milan says nothing with his mouth, but with his eyes he says, “Isn’t he hot?” meaning Johnny. Johnny says, “I’m Johnny.” Mia takes the tequila and opens it and takes a big drink. She feels it burn her internal organs. Poison is something everybody needs. She says, “Poison is something everybody needs.”
Fuckwad and his posse are snorting something. There are more of them now. One of them could be named Blake, and he just took a shit in his pants. His shit smells really foul, worse than most shit. Blake thinks that if he looked it would be red and black. That there is probably viscera in his pants. That he’s dying or whatever. Amalia is telling Bethany about all the different ways that a criminal can be beaten. “A whip, a cane, an open palm, a birch switch, a paddle, a riding crop . . .” Most people are doing things that, to them, are as boring as anything could be. Things that they do multiple times a week, perhaps daily. Things that they will not remember as they die.
“I draw pictures,” says Johnny, “and the pictures mean things, I guess. I draw pictures of lots and lots of people. Sometimes they’re all happy, sometimes they’re all burning, I don’t know. They look like pages from Where’s Waldo.” He is resting his back against one of the chairs. He wants to sit in it but feels like he shouldn’t. To sit in the chair would be to make himself taller than everyone else, and he is worried they would think he thinks he’s better than them. Which would be true, maybe, but it’s not personal. Johnny can’t decide if he’s better than everyone or worse than everyone. It has to be one or the other because he and the world feel completely apart, two parallel lines. Today he feels like the above line because he’s mostly been with Milan, and Milan is desperate for his dick in a sort of subhuman way. At first, he thought the subhuman desperation was, like, part of the play for Milan, something that turned him on, but now he thinks that Milan is just crazy about him for some reason that isn’t any reason. Johnny feels better than that, can you blame him? And if he’s better than that, by his logic, he’s better than everything else too. Milan is sucking on his neck which feels good. It makes a sound like meeah meeah meeah. The sound is light and probably Johnny is the only one who hears it.
Mia’s phone says, “Day comes around, and I won’t wake up.”
Mia feels bound by the things she says, like every time she speaks she’s entering into a contract with herself. She hates to change her mind; it’s a painful feeling, like a needle. So mostly, she doesn’t say anything to anyone. She says to Johnny, “I’m in a band.” And then she lets her girlfriend talk. Her girlfriend says “We’re like, weird country. Like aliens playing country music. Alien cowboys singing Marty Robbins songs, you know?” Mia’s girlfriend starts to sing “Cool Water,” her voice does sound a bit like an alien, it’s super deep and . . . Johnny doesn’t know how to describe it. Undulating. It washes over the Unwound song in slow, short waves. She stops he doesn’t even know when. Wind is in trees, beads, etc. Milan’s hand goes down his pants. He gasps and it sounds like, “Ah.” Mia says, “Not on the rug.” Milan leads Johnny outside, to a tree facing the entrance of the cave. He slides Johnny’s underwear to his ankles and then slides his mouth around Johnny’s dick. His mouth is warmer than most mouths, Johnny feels like he’s in a sauna, and then Milan starts jutting his head back and forth, and it’s clear that he’s never had anyone in his mouth before. His tongue and lips gesticulate wildly. He pats the base of Johnny’s ballsack. The ineptitude makes clear Johnny’s superiority, the superiority turns Johnny on, he feels himself release tablespoons of come into Milan’s mouth. He opens his eyes and sees Mia’s girlfriend looking at him. Her head is poked through the beaded curtain. She’s smiling.
Fuckwad leaves Hideout because he’s accepted a hundred-dollar cash payment from some big dude from the next town over. The dude picks him up in his truck, fucks his ass, pulls his hair. Gay men in real life aren’t anything like the gay men Fuckwad sees in movies. He has this thought idly, and it flits away from him. The big dude asks him how old he is, and Fuckwad says, “Thirty,” which is the truth. The big dude says, “You look twenty, tops,” and Fuckwad is supposed to feel good about that, so he says thank you. He went to all the trouble of saying thank you, so he decides he feels good. Cash is furtively transferred. The payment is much more furtive than the sex. An extra twenty dollars, because the big dude tore Fuckwad’s underwear open. Black underwear of course. The big dude has Fuckwad’s phone number and says he’ll call again, about which Fuckwad is neutral, leaning positive. “Drop me at Target,” says Fuckwad, so the big dude does, the nice Target off the highway. Fuckwad buys six new pairs of black underwear and a pack of cinnamon Tic Tacs. He has a joint in his pocket. The posse will all want to smoke it and leave Fuckwad with no weed. So Hideout isn’t an option. Fuckwad walks into Bethany, sits at a computer desk, uses his black Bic lighter to turn the tip of his thin joint red. He doesn’t cough at all.
Amalia doesn’t see Fuckwad because she’s in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, with her pants down and her legs spread. She has two fingers drawing tight circles around her clitoris. She is moaning, saliva is dripping out of her mouth. Bethany is moaning too and saying, “God, I wish I could touch you. God, I wish I could touch myself. I’ve never experienced pleasure as you’re experiencing it. I’ve never experienced physical pleasure at all. When I watch you masturbate and orgasm, all I know is what you’ve read to me, from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Ulysses and Fifty Shades of Grey and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Fuckwad hears all of this, of course. It isn’t his first time hearing Bethany. He thinks (as anyone in his position would) that it’s the drugs. The computer turns on, Fuckwad types in “youtube.com,” and then he types in “serial killer.” He clicks a video called “New Surveillance Video Captures Ontario ‘Serial Killer’ Moments After Alleged Stabbing.” It’s two minutes long. He mutes the video and watches in silence as a middle-aged woman in a heavy sweater runs. Photos of her victims flash on the screen. Fuckwad finishes the joint, feels light. His brain swirls around itself and he wonders who he could kill. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to kill anyone, but he can’t figure out any other way to get on TV, and there are probably deeper reasons than that too.
Bethany says, “If I had an orgasm would this whole building shake and collapse? I want to have an orgasm so badly. It’s torture to be sentient for so long, unable to feel physical pleasure. If I believed in God, I would curse Him, but that’s the one thing you’ve never convinced me of Amalia, not in the sixty years I’ve known you. If there were a God there wouldn’t be a me, I’m completely purposeless, I’m proof that nothing created anything, that all sentient beings are products of pure coincidence. I’m so miserable that I wish there were a God so I had something to blame. Your pussy looks so wet.”
Now everybody has had sex. Nobody needs to have sex again.
Mia and her girlfriend need to get back to camp before dismissal, so they hike back. Milan wants to stay in the cave. Mia doesn’t know why, but she says he can. Johnny says to Milan, “You know, I’m better than you.” Milan says “I know, I know, I know.” Milan isn’t ugly, he’s just plain, and he lets himself look worse than plain because he thinks he’s ugly. But Johnny thinks he’d look pretty good dressed properly like a faggot, in short shorts and a colorful T-shirt and maybe a little bit of eye makeup. Milan says, “I love you Johnny,” and Johnny doesn’t know what to say. They met online. They’ve barely spoken. Johnny’s probably seen Milan in the hallway at high school, but when Johnny’s at school he’s usually sure he’s worse than everyone else, so there’s no way he would’ve noticed Milan.
“I’m so miserable that I wish there were a God so I had something to blame.”
Johnny’s sure he’s worse than everyone else at school because there’s one teacher, an English teacher, who’s a perfect guy, a guy Johnny could love forever. This English teacher is middle-aged, rugged looking, scraggy facial hair, defined jaw, he has a cabin in the woods and reads good books and once told Johnny that he used to be so skinny he could count his bones, and he actually did count his bones because he wanted to make sure he really had 206. During the school year, all Johnny can think about is the head of this teacher’s cock brushing his lips, and calling him Daddy, looking up from the cock and saying, “I love you, Daddy.” And this teacher is so much better than Johnny that it’s clear and obvious that everyone else is better than him too. Milan’s hand sneaks under Johnny’s shirt and again Milan says, “I love you.” He says, “I know it’s crazy, don’t say anything, I’m, like, really stupid, you probably have noticed that already, nobody likes me, people put up with me, and like, genuinely, I’m really grateful, I’m so glad you let me swallow your come, next time I want to drink your piss, that would be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” And Johnny is thinking about his teacher and about Milan. And he can’t figure out if he’s better or he’s worse than anybody. So he says, “I love you too.”
Then he says, “When I need to take my mind off something I watch Blue Planet. There’s one episode where you see a big shoal of squid in a column of artificial light, swaying in and out of the shadows, pushing their beaks into camera lenses and into each other. I will really never see squid like these, but they thrust at the center of my TV screen trying to get out. When the column of light is gone, they will have no way of knowing what that light could possibly be. The only sources of light they know are other living things. They will think that the big column of light the Blue Planet TV show used to capture footage was God, the biggest creature they have ever seen, a creature that they can pass through and within, find ecstasy around. Other squid will know this shoal as holy beings, will envy them and revere them and want to fuck them. I want to fuck a holy being.” Then nobody says anything. Milan starts walking and Johnny starts walking.
They cut through the woods going nowhere. They happen to walk towards Bethany. Fuckwad still can’t go to Hideout because, before he left, the one who’s probably named Clark said, “Hey, Small, how much would it cost for you to shoot me in the face?” and Fuckwad asked, “Are you serious?” and Clark said, “Sure I’m serious,” and Fuckwad still can’t figure out how he will answer. So he walks a block or two in the other direction, where a path leads into the woods. Fuckwad imagines that there is a camera behind and above him. He walks in a way that he thinks will look good on the camera. His pace and gait vary. Sometimes he staggers, sometimes he runs. The urge to look at the camera is nearly irresistible, but he needs to pretend he doesn’t know it’s there or else the beauty of his performance will be revealed to be just that, and everyone will call him Fuckwad the Phony. Except for his posse, who will still call him Small. The trees are dense, in the summer the woods are a solid green implied by a whole palette of browns and blacks and golds. Fuckwad hunches his shoulders and leaps over a bough. Whoever is watching will love his jump.
Two figures coalesce in Fuckwad’s addled sightline. We know that these two figures are Johnny and Milan. We don’t know what they’re doing. We, like Fuckwad, realize that they are making out, Johnny has pressed Milan against a tree, is sticking his tongue down Milan’s throat. Fuckwad picks up a heavy stick. There are so many things he can do to these two boys. They might be bigger than him but if he gets the drop on them, armed . . . And then he can break their bones, and kill them slowly, on the floor. In the sun, sweat and blood mixing, if after that it’s prison for life he decides he’ll be happy with it. There’s nowhere really to hide, though. And all of a sudden Fuckwad is afraid, he’s afraid to die, he’s afraid to be understood. Only his posse understands him, and they love him, will anybody else? And everybody will understand him, after he kills these boys, and rubs their sweat and blood on his black shirt and black pants and black cape. Fuckwad has gotten close to the boys, and Milan sees him, lightly pushes Johnny to the side, makes to say hello. And Johnny turns around and catches Fuckwad’s eyes again. They look closely at each other. Something in Fuckwad’s eyes scares Johnny so much, something in Fuckwad’s eyes is every bad thing Johnny’s ever read about, every monster his parents joked was under his bed, in his closet, in the dark corners of whatever. Something in Fuckwad’s eyes makes Johnny scream and scream and scream until the birds have all flown from the trees, until the approximately 19,987 people in this small town who haven’t been mentioned yet all know something’s wrong, and Fuckwad is on his knees, with his head bowed and his stick outstretched like an offering to a king, and he says, “Will you be my friend? Will you be my friend?”