And once we’d exhausted those stories for the present moment, wanting to space them out, hold on to them, we talked about the posters. “I was thinking about this last night,” Zeke said. “Like, even if we stopped at this point, what would it matter?”
“It would matter a ton,” I said, “to me.”
“No, I know. I know that,” he replied. He shook his head, trying to figure out what he meant. “I mean, what would it matter to the rest of the world? Other people are already doing it. Like, it will either keep going or stop no matter what we do.”
“Well, okay, maybe.”
“No, I think it’s good, right? Like, we can keep doing it, and it’s okay if we keep doing it, and even if bad stuff happens, it’s not like we could stop it now.”
“That’s kind of philosophical,” I said.
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“I don’t know anything about philosophy,” I told him, “so I don’t know if it’s sound reasoning or not.”
“Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better because that guy died,” he said. And I knew this was coming. The first time I’d seen him after the news about Lyle came out, he had emphatically stated that he did not want to talk about it. And, selfishly, I had hoped maybe we would never have to talk about it.
“Oh, Zeke,” I whispered.
He was quiet for a second. He took another bite of his corn dog. “We killed that guy, Frankie. I mean, we were a part of it, for sure. I don’t care what you say, I know it’s true.”
“Well, yeah, we played a part in it. If we didn’t exist, Lyle would probably still be alive.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be if we didn’t exist, Frankie. You know, right? The big thing was that we made the poster. If we hadn’t made the poster, he would still be alive.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I know. But, it’s not just us. If his sister hadn’t gotten hurt. If she’d recovered. If those idiots hadn’t lied about being abducted by Satan worshippers. If the news hadn’t talked about it.”
“I know. I don’t think we have to take all the blame. But we have to take some of it. We really do.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “But that’s as far as I can go with it. I’ll accept it, but I can’t change it.”
Zeke looked at me and then nodded. “I think I’m just trying to figure out how I could have made this thing and still be a good person. Like, my intentions were good, right?”
“Yes, of course,” I told him.
“And what we made was good,” he said, and he sounded a little more confident now.
“It is good,” I said. “It’s the best thing ever.”
“And so it just keeps going,” he said. “Because it’ll keep going with or without us.”
I knew he was doing this for himself, that he wanted to know that he wasn’t a bad person. And it made me love him, even as it made me feel a little bit worse about myself. Because I didn’t care if I was a bad person anymore. I just . . . I just didn’t.
AND IT SPREAD. IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN TO ANYONE WHO DIDN’T grow up in the time before the internet how impossible this actually was, and for it to even reach me at that time meant that it was probably five times as prevalent as what I was hearing on the news or reading in the papers. This was not like a few years after that summer, when the whole chain of events was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Hard Copy and 20/20 and before it was mentioned on Saturday Night Live, where it turned out that Harrison Ford was putting up the posters, though he blamed it on a one-armed man, and before the TV movie The Edge: The Story of the Coalfield Panic or the twenty-seven-song concept album by the Flaming Lips called Gold-Seekers in the Shantytown. This was before the streetwear company X-Large did an entire clothing line featuring the poster. This was before the Japanese streetwear company A Bathing Ape did a nearly identical clothing line featuring the poster five years later. This was before the series of articles in the New York Times about the Coalfield Panic won a Pulitzer Prize. This was before seven different people came forward to claim responsibility for the poster, before all seven of them were summarily disproven. This was before the poster had its own Wikipedia page, before there was theedgeisashantytown.com and wearefugitives.com and thelawisskinnywithhungerforus.com, which were the names of three different emo bands in the 2000s. This was before a wrestling message board said that the phrase came from a promo by the Ultimate Warrior that had never been released, and before people spent years trying to find a tape of it. This was before Urban Outfitters sold a print of the poster for forty-five dollars. This was before a famous chef in New York opened a fried chicken restaurant called Skinny with Hunger, which lasted less than a year. And before a huge contingent of citizens in a tiny Eastern European country overthrew their corrupt government, shouting, in English, “We are fugitives” as they stormed the president’s mansion, and one of the rebels, a young woman who was honestly way too pretty to be dealing with corrupt governments, held up a sign that said the same phrase for an iconic photograph that was featured on the cover of Newsweek. It was before all of that, which was much harder for me to understand than anything that happened during that summer, even though I do not understand very much about that summer, because it still feels like a dream. Because my life still feels like a dream. Because every single time that I reassure myself that what I have, the life that I’ve made, is real, I find myself automatically going back to that summer and playing it over and over and over again in my mind, and I still can’t quite tell you for sure that any of it really happened.