The Loss of Leon Meed
Josh Emmons
‘Josh Emmons is the real deal: a major league prose writer who has fun in every sentence; you want to keep reading him for the pure pleasure of his company’ Jonathan FranzenOver the course of one December, ten residents of Eureka, California, are brought together by a mysterious man, Leon Meed, who repeatedly and inexplicably appears – in the ocean, at a local music club, clinging to the roof of a barrelling truck, standing in the middle of Main Street’s oncoming traffic – and then, as if by magic, disappears.Each witness to these bewildering events – young and old, married and single, punk and evangelical, black, white and Korean – interprets them differently, yet all of their lives are irrevocably changed. Over time, these ten characters, previously only tenuously connected, form a strange community of shared experience.Highly original and brilliantly written, Josh Emmons’s award-winning debut is a mystery, a love story and something else entirely.
THE LOSS OF LEON MEED
Josh Emmons
Copyright (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This edition published by The Friday Project 2015
First published in the USA by Scribner in 2005
Copyright © Josh Emmons 2005
Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Josh Emmons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007592906
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007592913
Version: 2015-03-05
Praise for The Loss of Leon Meed: (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
‘Here’s how you know Josh Emmons is the real deal: he’s created a full spectrum of Californian characters who are ludicrous and ill-behaved and lovable in equal measure; he’s a major-league prose writer who has fun in every sentence without ever showing off or hitting a phony note; and you want to keep reading him for the pure pleasure of his company’
JONATHAN FRANZEN
‘Emmons writes with crisp, gratifying authority. The Loss of Leon Meed has considerable appeal … and succeeds in finding comic potential in unlikely places’
New York Times
‘Emmons cycles through and illuminates the plights of his diverse, crowded cast – including a recovering alcoholic, an overweight therapist and a Korean hippie – with a finesse that approaches that of a seasoned literary ventriloquist. The characters’ stories take on a cumulative, mesmerizing rhythm’
New York Times Book Review
‘An audaciously ambitious first novel … The Loss of Leon Meed is a canny status report on the American soul … engaging, enigmatic’
Los Angeles Times
‘A mystical ensemble fable about chance and fate and the importance of not giving up … Emmons has sizable talent [and] a real shape-shifter’s gift for imagining his way into lives different from, and especially older than, his own … There’s wonderful stuff here, little stylistic pleats, serifs and tailfins that root in the mind and just won’t budge. Its central enigma rewards speculation’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘As remarkable and moving a portrait of America as I have seen in some time’
GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Super Sad True Love Story
Dedication (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
For my parents
Contents
Cover (#u778b2b26-e871-58f6-98e1-8bdee602d35e)
Title Page (#uf256a3a4-7ba1-568a-93f9-930d9816a36e)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part II
January 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Josh Emmons
About the Publisher
Part I (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
1 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
Once, if you had driven north on Highway 101 from San Francisco past its outlying bedroom communities and vineyards and hippie enclaves, beyond blighted motels and one-pump gas station towns, over a road at times so winding and mountain-clinging that a moment’s distraction could steer you off a cliff and into freefall, you would have reached Eureka, the coastal seat of Humboldt County in northern California. It was a city whose forty thousand inhabitants faced the Pacific Ocean on one side and all of America on the other. It sat between the deeps.
You might then have forgotten about it if you were continuing on to the cities of consequence, to Portland or Seattle. Or to the windswept streets and unspoiled air of Canada. Or to the North Pole. You might have been scaling the planet and in no mood for its way stations.
But if you had stayed in Eureka, you would have discovered a weathered city with an almost granular fog and a high cloud cover, with temperatures rarely dipping below forty-five or climbing above seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, where tourists wondered how they’d slipped out of the California Dream. You would have wondered this, too, if you had compared the steely sky and faded architecture of Eureka with the sun and oceanfront villas of that dream. You would have thought that something was wrong.
The thing about dreams, though, is that they’re products of the imagination, and the imagination, like all engines of terror and transcendence, can do anything.
On an afternoon in late November, the last of the school buses pulled away and fourth-grade teacher Elaine Perry realized that she hadn’t asked any of her students to clean the chalkboard erasers. She stood by the tetherball pole and kicked a wood chip that sliced cleanly through the air and came to rest on the edge of the playing field where earlier that day a third grader had broken his leg. Children led dangerous, thrill-seeking lives. Spidering over jungle gyms, roof climbing, bike racing, contact sports. They chose the reckless and perilous, gravitated toward jeopardy and disaster. Adulthood is all about repressing that instinct, Elaine thought as she stared at Muir Elementary School’s main building, and learning to desire the predictable and unthreatening. Principal Giaccone’s office window was open. She hated cleaning the erasers and had been pleasantly surprised to learn when she began teaching in September that her students loved it. Giaccone had stopped by her classroom on the first day of school with a waxy red apple. “The forbidden fruit,” he’d said, presenting it to her. “Only if it’s from a certain tree in Eden,” she’d said, holding it up and reading its small white sticker: “This one comes from Washington.” Giaccone smiled and said he hoped her students appreciated what a clever teacher they were getting, that his own fourth-grade teacher, Miss Costigan, in addition to being the only centenarian in his hometown, had been a yearlong lesson in crotchetiness. Elaine caught the emphasis he gave to crotch and thought, These silly flirtations. I can’t have an administrative fling. They go so badly. I could lose my job. He could lose his. Not to mention our respective families, my kids and hus— “Call me if you need anything,” Giaccone said. “There should be a bullhorn in the supply closet.”
Elaine, wife and mother of two, from the town of Red Bluff seventy miles away, graduate of Humboldt State University, hair straightener, I Ching dabbler, and mystery novel consumer, did her job very well. In addition to teaching twenty-three fourth graders, she supervised the chess club, directed the school production of South Pacific, and ran the Gifted & Talented program. Her husband, Greg, was having an affair with a nurse named Marlene who worked at the hospital where he was an orthopedist. Elaine sometimes left her car beside the grove of old-growth redwoods that bordered the Muir Elementary parking lot and walked home past ranch-style houses painted the primary colors—red, blue, yellow—in rigid, unbroken order. She sang “A Cock-Eyed Optimist” and tried to mean it. In July her father had been discovered to have a meningioma, a tumor growing out of the thin membrane covering his brain called the meninx, for which he underwent an unsuccessful surgery and was currently in radiation therapy and taking a battery of antiseizure medications that often made him forget what he was doing. When Muir experienced budgetary cutbacks—“those pricks in Sacramento,” Giaccone had fumed in a moment of faculty meeting impropriety—Elaine learned that there might be layoffs of the last-hired-first-fired variety. Her husband grew lazy in his excuses for arriving home past midnight— “Honey, Steve might need me for an assist on a motorcycle wreck that just came in, some kid whose femur is sticking out of his kneecap. Don’t wait up. Love you”—which gave her the opportunity to singlehandedly feed, wash, encourage, and console their two children through their five- and nine-year-old growing pains. She ordered an awesome nine-inch dildo from a mail order company in San Francisco called Good Vibrations. South Pacific was a disaster. Two children, siblings who played the French murderer and Bloody Mary with amazing vivacity, were yanked out of school midway through rehearsals by their mother, then seeking a divorce from their father, and the rest of the cast seemed hopelessly far away from memorizing their lines—much less developing the wherewithal to sing in public—in time for the mid-December opening night. She found blood in her stool and was told by a gynecologist that she had an iron deficiency and needed to rest more during menstruation. But she never slept beyond four hours a night these days, reading macabre tales of murder and insurance fraud until her husband came home, at which time she’d feign sleep until his loathsome, sexually sated snore started up, and then she’d rise, fix herself a bologna sandwich, and resume reading in the TV den.
As she was clapping erasers outside, Principal Giaccone poked his head through the window and called down to her, “Elaine! Oh, Miss Perry! Could I see you for a minute?” And she entered the building and climbed the stairs to the first floor and knocked formally on his door and sat in front of him and listened to his spiel about financial constraints and the necessity of letting some top quality people go, and how he’d hate to have to do that to her, but how he might have to unless, well, unless they came to an agreement. Giaccone stared at a blank computer in front of him. Things have been building toward this, he said, concentrating on the empty screen and then turning to smile complicitly at her. His secretary had gone home and there was nobody else who could hear this stab at sexual coercion. This grossest form of blackmail.
“Are you saying,” began Elaine, sliding her gaze from Giaccone to a picture of him in a lineup shaking the governor’s hand, “that the only way I can keep my job is if I fuck you?”
Giaccone exhaled loudly—he’d been holding his breath—“God no,” he lied. “What gave you that? It’s just there are these extenuating circumstances, and certain difficult decisions have to be made—”
But Elaine was already standing up and straightening her skirt before reaching for the zipper along the side. “If that’s all it takes,” she said, pulling down her underwear.
Giaccone got up and stepped forward as though to intervene or help. “Don’t be that way,” he said. “I just thought you and I had this thing.”
Elaine unbuttoned her blouse and untucked Giaccone’s shirt. “We do. Lift up your arms.”
“Look, you’re doing this out of anger or something. There’s nothing erotic about this.”
“Of course there is. This is exactly how it works. Step out of your boxers. And take off your watch. Men should never wear a watch when they have sex. It’s too tempting for women to look at.” Elaine grabbed a tissue from the desk and used it to pull out her tampon, which she dropped in the wastebasket.
“Come on,” said Giaccone, staring with embarrassment at the wastebasket. “I didn’t know.”
“Now you do. Is this how you normally respond to naked women?” Elaine had Giaccone’s flaccid penis in her hand. Massaging it just below its head and then, as it grew and stiffened, stroking it up and down.
“Oh, yeah,” said Giaccone, coughing the words.
“Yeah. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
When Giaccone reached out to hold Elaine’s waist she caught his hand and pushed him back onto the desk, and as he got bigger she climbed up and sat on him and enfolded him.
“Oh, Jesus!” Giaccone cried out, stretching his hands over his head, pushing documents and the phone off the desk, writhing like a merman caught in a fishing net.
“You can’t bring him into it,” Elaine murmured. “He’s got nothing to do with it.”
When it was over she dressed while he lay staring at the ceiling.
“That was—” he said. “You hate me, don’t you?”
Elaine opened the door and said, “I don’t hate anybody,” closing it behind her. Down the hall she passed a wan twenty-something boy with thin blue hair wearing headphones and pushing a mop over scarred linoleum. He smiled at her and she smiled back, unable to gauge the innocence of the transaction, unable to gauge the innocence of anything. Outside, music was playing and she began to sing loudly, “I hear the human race/ Is falling on its face/ And hasn’t very far to go,/ But ev’ry whippoorwill/ Is selling me a bill/ And telling me it just ain’t so!”
“It just ain’t so,” she repeated to the trees and the cars and the houses and herself. “It could be awful and degrading and it could be a conspiracy of evil, but … but …” She let her voice fade to nothing and walked along as though carried by the wind, and when she remembered to look up through the breaks in the canopy of trees, the sky was a bright canary yellow.
Ten days later, at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Street, where Highway 101 hit the middle of its Eureka crawl, the night lights went off at the Pantry. It was seven thirty in the morning, and Silas Carlton had been drinking coffee and eating a Hungry Man Special for half an hour. He’d bought a Eureka Times-Standard on his way to the diner and read about the timber industry’s response to recent environmental activism. Both the article and the response were badly constructed; key elements of each contained errors.
Silas raised his coffee cup in salute to Teri as she walked by with orange-and-black-lidded coffeepots. He forgot which color meant decaffeinated and which meant regular, a distinction he’d known all his life. Like the names of friends and relatives that now escaped his immediate recall. Once familiar objects that had become strange. Orange meant something.
“Silas,” said Teri, pausing in her white sneakers and shadowy stockings, “I do declare I’ve never seen you ask for a third cup.”
“So you’ve turned into Scarlett O’Hara?” he said.
Teri smiled and refilled his cup and returned to the kitchen. The Times-Standard weighed in at twenty-four pages—depressingly small for the county’s largest newspaper. Silas read an article congratulating four county natives for running the Boston Marathon, although none had placed even in the top one thousand; an editorial explaining why the paper would discontinue its Public Safety Log, listing significant arrests (no longer had the space); and an Associated Press article about America’s zany love of meatless hot dogs. He skimmed local sports stories that had larger headlines than bodies, wedding announcements and syndicated comic strips and a company-profile “Who’s Who.”
He read more carefully when he got to the obituaries. These he appreciated. These were a chance for Silas, age seventy-five, to see what others were dying of and how and when and where. The details of death were increasingly interesting to him, and not just because it was less “later when I’m old” and more “any day now,” but because they seemed to come in two extreme varieties: the mundane and the horrific. Either “peacefully asleep in the arms of her husband of sixty years” or “shot in the head by a carjacker at the corner of H Street and Buhne,” provoking a “she was a fine lady” or “what the hell is wrong with this world?” Silas wondered how frequently there was a correlation between one’s death and one’s life, whether the old woman’s peaceful stroke ended a life of bone-deep righteousness or fantastic dissipation. And the carjack victim: choir boy or Hell’s Angel? Did karma play any part in our end? Was poetic justice mere poetry?
Silas’s life hadn’t been exemplary by certain standards, yet neither had it been unforgivable. There were things of which he was proud: raising his former wife’s diabetic son when she died and the boy’s father looked to be a slipshod guardian; refusing Shell Oil’s filthy lucre in exchange for his approval of their offshore oil drilling plan near Samoa; walking two miles in the middle of the night to a suicidal friend’s house and convincing her that depression, like happiness, was only temporary. As there was behavior of which he was ashamed: sleeping with his best friends’ wives (three best friends, five wives); knocking out a guy’s front teeth over a disputed game of pool; lying (to everyone, all the time, with and without reason). Silas wondered how, if at all, these things would affect his death.
He was a retired bike shop owner and former city councilman and often lonely. His outspoken criticisms of Eureka’s budgetary priorities and the state of America’s forests, which for many years had identified him in the community as someone who thought about big issues, now made him a curmudgeon.
He was tall and skinny and had bad posture from years of hunching over desks and trying not to be conspicuous around shorter people. Thick white hair shocked out of his head like a woodpecker’s, giving his bony features an avian quality. He wore sturdy black-framed glasses and black turtleneck sweaters like some funky old beatnik Rip Van Winkling in the twenty-first century doing his best Samuel Beckett impression and staring down the combined forces of illness, fatigue, and moral collapse. Yet nobody noticed him these days as he walked around Old Town and sat in coffee shops and listened and tried to eke out a meaning to his days. He blended into the background as someone you’d seen a thousand times but could never place from where. The social life now open to him centered on his niece Rebecca’s family—he’d once been close to his great-nieces Lillith and Maria—and chance encounters with people old enough to remember him. Very few occasions for him to forget names, altogether too few.
His death would make these people sad, and the other obituary readers out there would take note of it—perhaps like him they would speculate on its justice—and it would bring his family together for a day or two of discussing him fondly and resolving that life goes on. Silas’s sound and fury would be like the other sounds and furies that had signified nothing. He would disappear.
He looked across the diner at two mustachioed truck drivers—noted the grossly obtruding bellies over scrawny legs and the padded nylon vests and the feet that knew how to maintain 65 mph for several uninterrupted weeks—who hit each other lightly on the shoulder with the backs of their hands to emphasize a point or command a laugh-along. Touching someone makes them your friend. Silas recognized one of the men and miraculously remembered his name, Shannon Koslowski, whose father, Pete, had led the move to price-fix dairy products in the area thirty years earlier. Pete died two weeks ago. Aneurysm. Making an omelet.
Glancing down at the paper, Silas noticed a small box beneath the obituaries that said “MISSING: Leon Meed, of 427 Neeland Dr. Last seen on December 1. Age 54, medium height, curly brown hair. Any information, please call 555/2471.”
I’d rather go missing than die, Silas thought to himself. When you’re missing you still have a chance.
Later that morning at McDonald’s, Silas’s great-niece Lillith Fielding stood in front of an enormous griddle range with her manager, Ron. Heightened-senses Ron who saw everything and forbade—he was honor-bound not to allow—sloppiness and unprofessionalism. She sniffled and he wordlessly, reproachfully gave her a tissue. Her starched uniform rubbed against her armpits—the blisters were a matter of time and patience—and her face was breaking out despite her abstinence from eating at work. As though mere proximity to grease could ruin one’s complexion. She’d been on shift for five hours with only a single fifteen-minute break spent alone because no one else was on her schedule. In the women’s bathroom she’d filed her nails and written a limerick about the weediness of Ron, brushed her shoulder-length brown hair and separated it into two pigtails, and translated the amount of her first paycheck into Wiccan supplies it would buy. Then the break was over.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Ron asked, not looking at her, having eyes only for the range, where three small beef patties curled up slightly around their edges. It was hot in the cooking area and the milkshake machine behind them ground its way through a hundred pounds of frozen soybean crystals and strawberry extract in a successful cold fusion. Everything was equally delicious and nauseating.
“I don’t know,” said Lillith.
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“And you’ve had how many training days so far?”
“Four. But I wasn’t hired as a cook. I’m supposed to take drive-thru orders and then start at the cash register. Ambrose said those were going to be my only two shifts.”
“Ambrose is the assistant manager. I’m the general manager, and I thought I made it clear to you that we’re a team. If Latifa, say, has a problem and needs to leave the range then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to watch over her section while she’s gone. If I ever see you ignoring a problem because it’s not in your so-called section, I’ll deal with the result and you won’t like that deal.”
Lillith looked at the little concave burgers, at the staid runnels of grease scraped to the range’s corners, at the forearm-length spatula upside down beside three salt canisters. “Is the problem that the burgers are overcooked and should have been taken off sooner?”
“The problem,” Ron said, reaching across Lillith to grab a roll of paper towels, “is that this paper product was only a foot from the range, posing a fire hazard. It could have burned the restaurant down. Then how would you have felt about not taking responsibility for it?”
Ron motioned for Latifa, who’d been standing back during this interrogation, to return to the range, and walked away before Lillith could answer, leaving her alone with the feeling that she was a professional failure, and that she’d been cruelly bullied, and that she wasn’t observant enough, and that Ron was an idiot, and that she might lose her job, and that she hated her job and wanted to quit. But her feelings, she knew, were beside the point. This was about power and as in everything there were haves and have-nots.
Arriving home at the end of her shift, Lillith took off her colorful logoed baseball hat—one of the many things she hated about her job—crammed it into her bag, checked the mail, and unlocked the front door. Her one piece of mail was a flyer about an upcoming Wiccan festival in southern Oregon. Banana-grab and plop on the couch—ouch, who left a hairbrush here?—and TV-on and a few impromptu stomach crunches. It was important always to work on your abdominal muscles. She felt fat and the flesh folding over when she did a sit-up proved it. Maybe Sam had called. She rooted under the couch for the phone—where she preemptively hid it so that her little sister wouldn’t be able to hide it from her—and listened to the voice messages. Her mom’s gynecologist—dyke—and dad’s “squash buddy” and a weird high-pitched voice addressing itself to the head of the household and her ancient uncle Silas and that was it. No Sam. Fine. Maybe she didn’t like Sam as much as she thought she did. He was short. Dwarfish. She’d have to buy flat-heeled shoes to go out with him and put up with his Napoleon complex and probably never get to be on top. Why bother?
The next day Silas Carlton carefully lowered himself down the foldout steps of Eureka Transit’s number 9 bus at the South Jetty stop, where he stood between a peeling green bench and a former public bathroom in order to button up his barn jacket with cold, recalcitrant fingers. The bus groaned away and a bubbly blue car floated soundlessly into a parking spot to his left. He had particular difficulty with the top button.
Elaine Perry stepped out of the blue car and locked her door and a minute later was walking beside Silas, whom she didn’t know, up the oversoft sand dune that led to the beach. They avoided eye contact and altered their speed in a vain effort to establish distance between them, like two pedestrians approaching each other on an empty sidewalk who feint right and left in unison, seeming destined to collide until the final second when, greatly relieved, they pass without incident.
Once in sight of the water and at last a few steps away from Silas, Elaine removed her shoes, rolled up her chinos, and went to the shore’s edge. Silas stopped at the charred remains of an old bonfire and, responding to the strong easterly wind, hugged himself in a straitjacket pose and considered what a mistake it had been to make so many bus transfers (three!) just to reach this desolate stretch of ocean. Elaine stooped to pick up bits of shell and polished agates, looking for colors and shapes not already represented in her collection at home. Silas took out his bus timetable, which rattled angrily in the wind, and saw that there wouldn’t be a pickup for forty-seven minutes. In the distance a dune buggy roared; if either of them had squinted in its direction they would have seen it spin around and around, the driver having the time of his life.
It had been years since Silas was last at the beach, back when he’d still had a driver’s license and could chauffeur himself. It was a sorrowful thing to be dependent on public transportation in California. As it was to be old in America. He glanced around to find shelter from the insistent wind, but there was nothing other than the parking lot’s restroom, an abandoned lean-to with survivalist weeds pushing through the cracks in its door, so he took refuge in a fantasy of being seated at home, with a bowl of microwaved walnuts and hot cider.
Elaine stuffed an arrowhead-shaped rock into her pocket. She had come home at lunchtime the day before and found her husband, Greg, performing cunnilingus on a big red-headed woman whom she at first assumed was his hospital affair, Marlene, but who turned out to be someone else entirely. Greg arched up his back and turned to her, his hands still gripping the woman’s knees, an expression on his face like why-do-I-have-all-the-bad-luck? Elaine went to her desk and hunted around until she found their marriage certificate, lit it on fire, and dropped it onto the floor next to Greg’s underwear. Just the week before, her friend Rebecca had discovered that her husband was a deviant Internet porn troll. Why were people so disappointing? Why did you get so enamored of them and then learn once it’s too late to leave without serious psychological and emotional damage that they’re selfish and hurtful and better at deceit than anything else? Greg sprang into action when the flame had eaten half the certificate by using his discarded undershirt to smother it. “Elaine,” he said, his eyes smarting from the smoke, “it’s not what you think.” “Who’s thinking?” she asked with a fairly insane serenity. “Who can think at a time like this?” Pivoting around, she left the bedroom and didn’t come back until that evening, by which time Greg had cleared out an overnight bag of clothes and supplies and gone to stay at his friend Steve’s, or so he claimed in a scrawled, self-abasing note.
The ocean was a puce green that produced violent eight-foot swirling white waves a hundred feet out from shore and small clear waves closer in that broke and spread like liquid glass over the hard-packed sand. Elaine kicked the water and sent up tiny sprays in front of her. Sand crabs burrowed into frothing holes. Seaweed eyelashes were splayed in midblink all around.
Silas, not gaining much traction in his daydream of warm nuts and hot drinks, opened his eyes when he heard the loud cries of either a man or sea lion coming from the water. He saw what appeared to be an arm rise out beyond the waves and then walked as quickly as his knees allowed toward Elaine, who stood by the shore surveying the horizon on tiptoes.
“Is that a person?” he asked.
“I think so,” said Elaine, just as the cries ceased. They scanned the water where the arm had been, but where there was nothing now but the ocean’s tumult.
Ten seconds went by.
“Where’d he go?” Elaine asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The undertow at this beach is—I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Wait, do you hear that?”
They listened and looked and there was the man again, calling out like he’d never stopped, “Hellllyelllp!”
“I’m going in,” Elaine said, handing her phone to Silas. “Here, call 911.”
Holding the tiny plastic device high and at arm’s length to study its miniature number pad, Silas dialed and then spoke their imprecise location on the South Jetty as Elaine waded into the water and made slow, determined progress against the direction of the tide. The man crying for help was clearly visible now, a head and bit of shoulder being lifted up by the waves and ground into the egg-white surf. Elaine inched closer to him with effort. The man’s voice sounded gargled and desperate; Elaine was practically swimming in place. And then, as suddenly as he’d stopped before, the man went silent and was no longer visible. Elaine kept valiantly swimming. A minute passed. Two. Three.
“I don’t see him!” Silas called out hoarsely.
Elaine turned her head and was instantly pushed back toward the shore. “What?”
“He may have gone under!”
“Did you call the ambulance?”
“Yes!”
“Good!”
“What?”
“Good!”
“Yes!”
“It’s freezing in here; I’m starting to go numb!”
“You should come back. It’s dangerous out there!”
“His body could be floating around! I could drag him in!”
“That’s too risky! You could get hypothermia!”
“I’ve had that before!”
“What?”
“I’ve had that before!”
“Come back!”
By the time Elaine reached the shore she was panting and coughing and purplish with cold. An ambulance dopplered into the parking lot beyond the dunes. Silas and Elaine went to meet it and explain that a man had drowned, that they hadn’t seen him go out in the water, but that there he’d met his end. Elaine insisted that Silas sit with her in her car with the heat on full blast until the police arrived to take their statements. They didn’t know who the victim was. A man. Impossible to speculate on his age, build, or ethnicity. Elaine, Silas, the police, and the ambulance workers all talked on the beach with one eye on the water to see if the body would wash up. Didn’t. Nothing. Sleeping with the fishes. Elaine felt ill, as though she were still out among the waves, rising and falling, searching the water to see—what? What had she hoped to find that wouldn’t frighten her beyond comprehension? Eventually nothing more could be said or done.
It never snowed in Eureka. Too close to sea level—it was sea level—so when Eve Sieber woke up to see her car covered in snow she told herself she was still dreaming. Which wasn’t true. When you’re awake you know it, and you only say you’re still dreaming in order to make a rhetorical point about the strangeness you’re witnessing. Fine, so she was awake, but the snow was nevertheless unusual. Must have been the New Weather. The snows of Kilimanjaro were melting, the polar ice mass was decreasing, the average temperature of southern California had risen two degrees over the last twenty years. Why not snow in Eureka? Why not tempests and tsunamis and terrorific tornadoes? This was a meteorological paradigm shift, and Eve was ready for it.
In the small aqua-tinted kitchen her caffetiere melded together tap water and coarsely ground Peruvian Blend coffee. A city-owned truck cruised slowly past her building as two men shoveled salt directly onto the snow-laden street. Shouldn’t they have plowed the street first? Eve stared at the caffetiere and touched the side of its glass briefly—hot as a fire poker, not that she’d know from personal experience—and then stumbled into the bathroom. Diarrhea was a horrible feeling. She’d gained a pound by the time she was done on the toilet, mysteriously. Is the scale broken? She took a shower and stroked her sore nipples—Ryan had really gone infantile on her last night, nursing on her breasts with the suction vehemence of a cartoon baby One-Tooth, then insisting she tie knots in a handkerchief and stick it up his ass during sex with the instruction to pull it out when he came—and shaved her legs. She was as into experimentation as the next girl—hadn’t the handkerchief been her suggestion?—but she had to worry now about them getting to a stage where normal sex—the old boy/girl in-out—would no longer appeal to her or Ryan. She loved him, or thought she did, which could be the same thing, but their tastes were doomed to become so extreme that eventually death would be their only unexplored sexual aide, and with mutual asphyxiation already behind them—last week, silk stockings, bed knobs and broomsticks—death might not be so far away. Think of what she’d leave behind: her shitty job at Bonanza 88 selling key rings and discount chocolate bars to large, prematurely aged women and their hordes of children. So many kids and such harried women and such sad interest in cheap imitation-brand clothing, not bought for durability or style but for sheer economy. The women didn’t smile, and they were always alone with their kids. If a man was present, some errant father hauled in by the alimony police, he was so obviously just-released from a halfway house, detoxed and pathetically unable to focus on any object long enough to pick it up, that Eve had to think, Why do they take these losers back? This woman here at the register is grim and overworked and I’d hate to be her, but can it possibly be better when that brandied moron is around? Yet Eve knew that the only thing separating her from these women was ten years. Or five. She was twenty-three and still childless and not unattractive—with soft blue eyes and clean high cheekbones, she had, for Eureka, an almost otherworldly beauty—but she’d gotten to the point where she didn’t lie to herself anymore and imagine a glorious future of fame and financial sanguinity. That wasn’t in the cards. Her pair of deuces was the janitor at Muir Elementary School, whose junk habit was quickly getting beyond anyone’s control, and whose celebrated love technique was turning into the kind of thing Houdini would have done if he were irreparably stoned and scatological. So much for the promise of youth. So, so much.
Eve put on a torn zip-up ski suit and a pair of moon boots—God, she looked weird—and kicked some clothes and magazines into a corner of the cramped living room. Then she left her two-story apartment building, a gray stucco edifice sandwiched on both sides by single-family homes, and walked to Sequoia Park, where the redwoods were impassively flecked with snow. The old stalwarts, never fazed, never in the least betraying anxiety, not even when the deafening chainsaw buzz finished and they were given a colossal nudge in one direction and fell, fell, were felled. She ripped off a piece of bark and brandished it like a sword, making Zorro curlicues in the air, stabbing at invisible enemies, sidestepping their retaliatory jabs. Touché! She won, for now, her imaginary battle.
Later that evening, in Old Town Eureka, at the Fricatash Club, Eve sat with an energy drink and a carton of cigarettes given to her by Ryan for safekeeping while he visited a self-taught chemist who was said to be doing exciting new things with crystal meth. Eve had come straight from work and so wore a pink short-sleeved shirt with her name stitched over her left breast in a luxurious cursive and the Bonanza 88 logo patched over her right breast. It was hot in the Fricatash and she worried that the black hair dye she’d accidentally gotten on her scalp earlier that morning would smudge down her forehead, half hidden by bangs, when she danced. And had she scrubbed the bathroom sink thoroughly enough that the dye wouldn’t permanently stain it? The show tonight, consisting of four moon-faced bands, was to raise money for the skate park that the City of Eureka had just decided not to build. Eve loved one of the bands, Derivative, and got increasingly excited sitting there with her medicinally caffeinated drink and two hundred cigarettes. Would they be fined by their landlord for the sink’s later cleaning or replacement? Did she even need to ask?
“Eve, you have all those cigarettes.” Skeletor plopped down at her table like a kid late for dinner. He was lanky, he was all lank. Arms and legs like a stick figure’s. Pure bone. Bony knees and elbows and shoulders. Big green eyes like they’d glow in the dark. A rictus for a mouth. You saw his jaw move independently of his skull. The guy was a walking X ray. “Since when can you afford a whole carton?”
“They’re Ryan’s.”
“Since when can he afford?”
“Yeah,” Eve said with mock curiosity, “I wonder how much he paid for them.”
“You mean with or without tax.” Skeletor gave a total-gum smile and you swore his skin was going to peel away. “I’d kill for a smoke right now.”
“I can’t break the packing seal. Wait’ll Ryan gets here.”
A concealed-disappointment: “Okay.”
“When’s Derivative playing?”
“Later.”
“Could you be less specific, please?”
“Later or maybe earlier.”
“And to think I used to tell people you weren’t retarded.”
“You’re developing the potential to be a real bitch.”
“I thought I was a cunt already. You said so last week.”
“Whatever. Let’s play dominoes.”
“They put away the set.”
“But it’s not eight yet.”
“Yeah, well, go tell it on the mountain.”
Skeletor leaned back on the park bench that the Fricatash supplied instead of chairs at its tables and surveyed the crowd of sixty Crayola-headed Eureka cool kids of death. No music played and so they stumbled around on their own, borrowing money from each other. The ones not too stoned to converse conversed; the others made sounds in code, using the same low register “ahhhh” to mean I’m-hungry and isn’t-she-hot and I’ve-gotta-sit-down-for-a-minute and when’s-this-gonna-start and I-read-the-news-today-oh-boy. It was the one-note language of infants that some hidden recess of the brain could translate, a sound to represent everything and nothing.
The Fricatash bar was doing brisk coffee business, as this was a northern California establishment catering to minors. The management, a middle-aged Bengali man named Ravi, expected to be visited by the cops at least twice over the course of the evening and hassled and warned about slackening his vigilance against any on-site drinking by his patrons. Nobody was getting away with anything so don’t get any ideas.
Through the crowd stumbled Ryan in his bomber jacket emblazoned on the back with a child’s iron-on koala bear patch. He squeezed in on the bench between Eve and Skeletor and promptly started laughing, hardy har har at first and then the Crack-Up, body spasming around while he bent forward and muffled his screams in his arm, his long periwinkle-blue hair hanging over the edge of the table like a waterfall. Eve and Skeletor scooted away from him.
“Hey, man.” Skeletor placed a hand on Ryan’s shaking shoulder like a priest consoling a distraught parishioner. “Can I bum a pack of cigarettes?”
But Ryan could only give little tug boat toots and shudder. His brain was being tossed around on a trampoline, and when Eve looked at him she saw five hours into the future when he would be jerking through his nightly pantomime of sleep, in a constant cold sweat despite the seventy-degree room temperature. Eve would sleep fitfully for as long as possible, but eventually, at four or five in the morning, scared of the thought of having to get up and go to work at eleven, she’d take one of the prescription sleeping pills they bought from her aunt, and his twitching would get less noticeable, and she’d sink far from the material world until the alarm clock ripped her back into it.
“Tonight, ladies and germs, we have a very big shoe for you,” said a young man with slicked-back hair doing a kind of Catskills Lodge emcee voice, an Ed Sullivan redux. He wore a pea-green thrift store suit that was too tight around the chest and high around the ankles, a Frankenstein fit that he exaggerated by holding his breath and pulling up on his belt. “I see lots of beautiful people and know you’re going to have a beautiful time. So beautiful I can’t stand it. So sunset beautiful I have a beehive in my belly.” He dropped the microphone to his side. Someone from the audience told him he was beautiful. “Could we have a rilly big round of applause for …” he let the words hang in the air, “for …” his eyebrows went up searchingly, “you’re all so beautiful,” and now there was a hush and someone threw a water bottle at him that barely missed, “I love the nightlife baby,” as the spotlight moved up and back, “people, come closer, I won’t bite and neither will,” to an assembled four-person band, “the Sloe Eyes!”
Pandemonium.
When the Sloe Eyes ended their set and left, Eve saw the guitarist for Derivative attach his guitar to an amp at the back of the Fricatash stage while the singer breaststroked in place. She got up from the table and pushed past Ryan, who had stopped laughing and now sat with his shoulders slumped forward on the bench like a boxer after losing a fight.
Eve squirmed through people and made a clearing for herself near the stage, where she waited patiently for the band to begin. Refused a swig from a bottle of soda that had been emptied and filled with gin. Just said no to drugs. Had a brief exchange with her coworker Vikram, there because he’d heard a woman he liked was coming, though she was nowhere to be seen and he was too tired to be bouncing around with kids half his age. Adjusted her bra strap that had somehow gotten flipped over.
Derivative began with its dolphin song, choruses of eeek-yiiiiik, and Eve was put in a bad mood because how can anyone honestly like to listen to such annoying piercing shit? It was the band being perverse and frustrating their fans’ expectations, which Eve admired in theory but hated in practice. She wanted them to frustrate the fans who expected something out of the ordinary like the dolphin song, not her expectation of their brilliant fifty-second threnodies.
The next song was a coy little number about a boy and a girl playing at being animals. And it got graphic real quick. “My birdie flies into your nest oh whoa oh.” Eve loved this song and forgot all about Ryan’s death on the installment plan. And the probability of Bonanza 88 going out of business. She was lost on a planet of sound and saw no reason to try to find her way back. “Try my acorn try my acorn I’ve hidden it just for you.”
Eve stepped backward and forward in time to the music. She jostled bodies and felt around for floor openings in which to put her feet and soon realized that her shirt was clinging wet in back. Nobody should have had time to sweat that badly, so she turned around to see who was responsible for her wetness and saw an old guy, in his fifties at least, dripping in an open-collared shirt. Hair pasted to the side of his head. People had moved away from him, presumably because he’d also gotten them wet, so he was surrounded by a ring of clear space. Eve couldn’t place where she’d seen him before, certainly not at the Fricatash. The man had no business being there. Not that Eve was ageist. Far from. She just didn’t think it was right for soaking wet old guys to thrust themselves into the middle of young people’s fun.
The song ended and the bassist drank an iced coffee and the drummer buried his head in his hands. Eve glanced in Ryan’s direction, saw Skeletor edge a pack of cigarettes out of the carton. A girl she recognized from McDonald’s stepped into her line of sight. Facing forward she saw the old wet guy now directly in front of her, almost stepping on her toes.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The man stepped aside and said, “Could you tell me where we are?” His voice was soft and respectful, not belligerent like the bums his age who’d given up on the niceties and now were just complete assholes. He even looked a little melancholy, appropriate for someone who’d been around a long time.
“The Fricatash. Why are you wet?”
“Is it still December fourth?”
“No,” she laughed, “it’s the tenth,” although once she said it she was unsure. Something was—she’d seen this man before.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know, nine. Were you just swimming?”
“No. Did you see how I got here? Did someone bring me?”
“Oh hey!” she exclaimed. “You’re the guy who’s missing!”
“I’m Leon Meed,” he said. “I’ve gone missing? You’ve heard this?”
“It was on the news and—”
Eve was pushed forward by a wave of people moving in to hear Derivative’s next song, a gospel number, and in the resulting visual stutter she lost sight of Leon. People in the audience swayed and stomped and did little gyrations. They raised and lowered their hands like revivalists to these frail white boys, to the basso profundo “Our time it gets no righter/ Our load it gets no lighter/ Take me Lord to where the light shines brighter.” And everyone humming the way you do when you can’t contain the beck and call of whatever It is to you.
She looked everywhere and despite the density of people making escape impossible, Leon was gone. Her back was dry. There was nothing to say but amen.
At four thirty a.m., Silas Carlton stopped telling himself that he was asleep. His daily confession. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom and sponge-bathed his face and arms before padding into the living room, where he turned on the television with the hope of finding a local news story about the drowned man at the South Jetty. There was nothing on but a documentary about leukemia that spotlighted three American casualties of the war between good and bad white blood cells: a man, woman, and child whose stoicism never faltered on camera. Silas ate the remains of a ham sandwich he’d left on the coffee table the night before, fell asleep at a quarter past six, and, upon reawakening in an upright position on the recliner, patted his chest for his glasses that had slipped off. Failing to locate them, he muted the TV and stared at his fading reflection in the living-room window. Outside was a pallid gray dawn. He’d never before seen an accidental fatality such as had happened at the beach, someone overpowered by the forces of nature. Despite the frequency with which floods and earthquakes and erupting volcanoes and hurricanes took lives, he’d never—
Suddenly, in the window, instead of his dying reflection Silas saw another man’s face. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and resumed searching for his glasses with the other. The man must have been a visitor—at last someone dropping by to check on him—but Silas couldn’t see his features distinctly, could only generally make out curly hair and a brown shirt or coat. Pointing toward the front door, he said loudly, “It’s open! Come in!” The man didn’t move. “It’s open!”
Silas found his glasses, wedged between the bottom pillow and armrest, and put them on, though because of the poor lighting outside he still couldn’t recognize the man. Was it Beto the Argentinian stopping by to see if he’d like to fly his remote control airplane with him? Or one of his neighbors hoping to borrow a bicycle pump? Silas didn’t understand why the man wasn’t going to the front door, so he moved to get up and let him in, at which point the man disappeared. Silas was halfway out of his chair when he found himself looking through the window at nothing but a lava rock garden, mulberry bushes, mini lawn, street, parked cars, other houses, and wrought-iron sky. No man. He didn’t rush to conclusions, for he was perhaps hypnagogic, his sleepy eyes playing tricks on him. He sat back down to consider things and adjust his glasses as though they were a radio dial that, properly modified, would clearly broadcast what had been garbled.
He waited and waited and sensed nothing but static.
2 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
In a beige house in the Cutten neighborhood of Eureka, an orthopedic surgeon named Steve Baker entered the music room, where a dark cherry wood piano stood as a four-legged accusation, a sixty-one key universe of potential sound whose silence was the loudest he had ever heard. He sat on the bench in front of it, on lavender varnished cedar dimpled over time by the hard fingernails of hundreds of frustrated eleven-year-olds sitting through thousands of mother-mandated lessons while thinking of millions of other things. He’d fought over this piano, defended his love of it in sotto voce with nothing-could-induce-me-to-give-it-up conviction.
And Anne, his wife, appealing to reason, had pointed out with growing impatience that he never played it, that he’d bought it for their never-conceived child, for the express purpose of her teaching this phantom progeny how to play, because she had studied it all her life, and she loved it and looked forward more than anything to twice-weekly sessions with Wendy, if it was a girl, or William, if it was a boy. She had oiled its strings, tuned it regularly, polished its fine wood grains and lacquered its ivory keys and fluttered around it during the move from Egret Road to Kroeber Lane like a paleontologist transporting a dinosaur egg.
It was absurd not to let her keep it, especially since she’d been so generous toward him with everything else—with the bread maker and the twelve-horsepower rototiller and the waist-high Klipsch speakers—although absurd was exactly what he felt their whole breakup was. Absurd because it was so rational and calculated. Their love? Plus one. His sterility? Minus two. And it was absurd because she insisted on living in a small town (“Any small town, I don’t care. Can’t you see how much choice that gives you? How many options?” she’d asked), and because he couldn’t do little things like stay with her while she finished her breakfast on Sunday mornings—no, he had to retreat to his work study once he was done eating to work on his models, and he wouldn’t acknowledge the symbolic importance of these abandonments—and because they had voted for different candidates in the last mayoral election (“The presidential election, sure, I grant you,” he’d said, shaking the garlic press at her, “that would be enough for you to get angry and say that we’re incompatible. But the Eureka mayor? Who cares?”). The pros and cons of their relationship were weighed, and a gross imbalance was found. Scales didn’t lie. “But scales aren’t the only thing to go by,” he’d said. “Do you really want—because we could adopt and split our time between big and little towns and move toward political consensus in the future—do you really want to let it go just like that?”
Though it wasn’t just like that. She pointed out that he’d conspicuously not mentioned the issue on which he was solely to blame and which most upset her, his inconsiderateness when she felt alone and needed his company, those times when he’d disappear and say he had to be by himself and that it was chemical and nothing to take personally. But how else could she take it than personally? She wasn’t a machine, no matter how radically our language had upgraded from brain hemispheres to hard drives. And maybe this proved in a way that her love for him was insufficient and had always been insufficient, but that the possibility of raising children in a semirural community overseen by a wise, mutually agreed upon mayor had once been enough to supplement her feelings and make the relationship worth working on. Now, clearly, the situation had been exposed for what it was. She had accepted a job in the town of Willits, two hours south of Eureka—he hadn’t even known she’d been looking—and packed up her things and moved out, leaving Steve with an untouched piano and the feeling that he would soon fade away. This was what he heard in the silence, the sound of his own diminuendo.
He closed the piano lid and pinched the tip of his long aquiline nose. His hair, an auburn brown rusting into gray, dug softly into his neck. His fellow doctor Greg Souza’s suitcase lay open on the couch. Greg was staying with him while initiating divorce proceedings against his schoolteacher wife, Elaine, or maybe Elaine was initiating them against him—Steve didn’t know the details of it and thought only that divorce was spreading like a virus.
He decided to go for a drive, which he did as an offensive against depression more frequently than he cared to admit, occasions on which he’d go anywhere, didn’t matter, so long as he was moving and there was music and lots to look at and to distract him. His depression would be subdued temporarily, and he’d arrive home a few hours later, if not mentally restored then at least closer to being able to go to bed.
Today he drove to Table Bluff, a cliff and beach area five miles south of Eureka and near a recently built Wiyot community housing project, an evolutionary step forward in Indian reservations where the land was governed by the tribe but maintained by the State of California. With independent police and dependent roads. Steve passed it and thought, This is the sort of town where Anne and I could have ended up. Maybe not this particular town, because you have to be Native American to live in it, but somewhere this size where real estate is cheap. I could have made that concession.
He saw the ocean in the distance at intervals as the road wound up and down hills, with undulating fields of buffalo grass on the left and isolated homesteads and dilapidated barns on the right. Something was wrong. Steve pressed harder on the accelerator and found himself going slower. The fuel light had been shining empty for who knew how long. A gas can in the back? No, damn it. Embankment park and a leg stretch around the car and some self-reproach for not filling up the tank earlier. It wasn’t more than two miles back to the Wiyot housing project, though he didn’t remember seeing a gas station there. Noise up the road and Steve saw a truck round the bend at a dangerous clip and he stood helplessly—or with what he hoped was a posture of helplessness and entreaty—waving a hand for the truck to stop. It was maybe seventy yards from him when he saw, beggaring belief, a man clinging to the gun rack on the truck’s roof. Lying facedown and spread-eagle, holding the edges of the rack for purchase, this man was head forward and Steve thought he heard—yes, without a doubt he caught—him shouting “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Steve hoped that his and the man’s combined request would bring the truck to a halt, though this hope was dashed as the truck raced past him, its driver with the tensed and fearful expression of someone trying to escape the hounds of hell. Then the truck was gone and Steve stared after it. A haze of dust, nothing. He resigned himself to walking and the thought sank in that he’d just witnessed an act of recklessness for which he’d probably be called in to surgery later that day. And something else wasn’t right. Something even less right than the obvious not-rightness of two men barreling down a country road in equal states of panic and unequal states of personal safety. Steve thought he recognized the face of the man on the roof. It was the fleetingest of glimpses, but still.
At the Wiyot housing project he received a lawn-mower gas canister in exchange for ten bucks and the promise to return it to a stern-countenanced, gloriously ponytailed man also named Steve.
The days passing meant nothing. At the office, the mental exhaustion that used to take ten hours to develop now happened in less than one. Another patient? X rays to examine? Deposing for a malpractice case filed three years ago? His constant torpor made it all seem so useless and unmanageable, like he didn’t have the stamina and couldn’t everyone see how much effort living cost? How it was a trek too far? He had difficulty listening to people. They wanted to tell him things—“my wife’s cousin’s daughter was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, but was disqualified for lying about her LSAT scores, which everyone knows can be taken a million times before applying to law school and they average the scores, should that even be what she wants to do, and believe me my wife’s cousin’s daughter has some real reservations about that”—that he didn’t want to hear. To foster the sense of self rapidly slipping away from him, he moved from his habitual stimulants (coffee, Coke, ginseng root extract) to borderline legal amphetamines that his friend and colleague and current house-guest, Greg Souza, prescribed for him.
This was unfortunate because as a surgeon he depended on his powers of concentration. It was his great gift as a doctor. He’d made a name for himself by being able to do a spine—seven hours of standing in place with his latexed fingers sawing and threading and manipulating microscopic tools—without taking a bathroom break or pausing for a candy bar or sitting down to let his legs uncramp. In another life he’d have made an exemplary monk. Or mime. Or sentry in charge of protecting kings and emperors and other representatives of God on earth.
Before the divorce started he’d spent much of his nonworking time building fantastic miniature reproductions of medieval towns using balsa wood and soft chromium. His Salzburg could hold its own against any model out there. His Venice was the work of a maestro. But now he’d sit down at his worktable with a stack of three-eighthinch wood squares and an X-acto knife and a tube of wood glue, unable to pick up anything without his hands shaking and a drifting—no, a darting—mind. In his current condition the only cities to which he could do justice were World War II–era Dresden or Hiroshima or Coventry. Maybe an earthquake San Francisco. And he’d reached a point in life where he hadn’t any friends. Or: he had friends, but not friends whom he could call and tell about the he-said/she-said of the divorce, the Thursday afternoon meetings at Anne’s lawyer’s office, where he and his lawyer and she and her lawyer sat at a diplomatic table using diplomatic language better suited to the Treaty of Versailles than to the breakup of two people who’d loved each other intensely once, who’d cried when the other got hurt and exulted when the other felt joy and said “forever” and “completely” and “unconditionally.” The end of this marriage foretold everything. It said that he was incapable of sustaining a loving relationship and doomed, at best, to serial monogamy until he died. No growing old with someone. No twenty-year anniversaries and wistful recollections of their younger bodies and younger passions and younger worlds.
His colleague friend Greg Souza’s divorce was because of rote infidelity and Greg had had nothing thoughtful to say on the occasion that he and Steve went through the verbal condolences with each other, the I-can’t-believe-how-everything-changes. Although Greg was technically staying with him until he found an apartment, he’d been spending his nights at Marlene’s and was never around.
So Steve was alone on Saturday, December 11, trembling knife in hand, when the doorbell rang. He’d managed to forget Anne for a minute and was remembering what Silas Carlton, an old patient, had told him about birds: they have extremely small lungs and so use their bones to circulate oxygen. “Very nice,” he said, and opened the door.
Elaine Perry stood with one foot on the welcome mat, holding two plastic garbage sacks. Hints of the previous day’s makeup were so subtle that he thought her lips were naturally the color of persimmons.
“Hi, Steve,” she said.
They hadn’t seen each other in maybe ten months. Anne had always praised Elaine as the best of his doctor friends’ spouses, as a woman wisely unconcerned with extravagant houses and her children’s orthodontic work.
“Hi,” Steve said.
“I don’t want to make this awkward, but Greg said he’d pick up these bags a couple of days ago and he never did. Do you mind if I drop them off? Is he here?”
“He’s out, but I can take them.” They were heavy and full of pointy, uncomfortable objects that dug into him as he held them against his chest. “I wanted to say—I should say I’m sorry about what’s going on.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry for you, too.”
They smiled more by effort than by natural feeling. Like so many outward signs of health and normalcy.
“Would you like to come in?” Steve asked, unsure of what else to say. “For a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks. I shouldn’t be here when Greg comes back.”
Steve was about to tell her that Greg never came back before noon, but then thought better of it. He shifted the bags in his arms and it didn’t occur to him to set them down.
“I hope we can be normal with each other,” she said.
“What?”
“I hope that you being Greg’s friend doesn’t mean we have to avoid each other at the supermarket or in Old Town or wherever.”
“No, absolutely not.” He’d never run into her at the supermarket or in Old Town before, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the future. Eureka was a small enough city that you sometimes saw your dentist or hair stylist or friends’ ex-wives at restaurants. You perfected an ever-readiness to talk about your teeth or hair or neutral, non-friend-related gossip. You skated across the surface reality like a water beetle, and only when the surface broke and you fell in did you feel that drowning was inevitable, that staying afloat had been a fantasy.
Elaine said, “I just—maybe you feel the same I don’t know—I don’t want to feel like getting divorced means that a whole world of people will disappear. You know? All of Greg’s friends and patients I’ve met. I’d hate to think that now we have to act like we’ve never known one another.”
“I know what you mean,” Steve said. “I agree.”
Elaine held out her hand. Still holding the bags, Steve shook it awkwardly with his whole upper torso. Then she turned and walked to the street, massaging her left shoulder with her right hand. Steve watched her get in her car and drive away, someone else’s former everything.
Several blocks away, Sadie Jorgenson’s willpower deserted her in the wall-to-wall linoleum sparklage of her kitchen, with batter all over her hands, making one Swedish pancake after another, smothered in powdered sugar the weight and consistency of pixie dust. She was a therapist whose client list was longer than any of her colleagues’, meaning that at the end of a grueling workweek she owed herself a little—or rather a lot—of pleasure. And so didn’t she feel magical with each bite of pancake, a wild transport to zones of physical ecstasy she never experienced otherwise? Sadie, thirty-seven, hadn’t gotten laid in years, which she knew was partly because of morning binges like this one, but what could she do since the cycle was already started and each production of one kind of happiness diminished her chances for the other? Undress another stick of butter. Fondle the pan handle. And the radio on and she with a lot of boogie left to her bottom that hadn’t lost its attitude, so she let the pancake sizzle while she clapped her hands and danced around the island counter and nodded (“you know it, ah-hahn”) and licked an ample finger.
And yet all this might soon change. Her sister Marlene had called the night before and known the perfect guy, an academic. An academic? Yeah. What’s that mean? Someone who traffics in ideas for a living. That doesn’t sound as lucrative as, say, trafficking in narcotics. It isn’t. Is that why he’s still unmarried? He’s new to town and hasn’t met anyone. I think you two would hit it off. Why? Because he’s interesting. What’s he look like? He’s tall and— How tall? I don’t know, five ten. You call that tall? It’s taller than you. Don’t be rude. How old is he? Thirty-seven. That’s my age. Yeah. Guys don’t go out with women the same age as them. It’d be better if he were older. He’d appreciate me more. He seems above all that. And he’s bald. As long as he has the right head for it. Not too big or bumpy, like a smooth small skull that draws attention to his face. Yeah, sort of. And there’s one other thing. He’s missing four fingers on his right hand from when he was young and worked with heavy machinery. Oh. Other than that he’s normal and attractive. Oh. I didn’t even notice until it came up in conversation. Oh. So what do you say? I wish he hadn’t lost those fingers. I’m sure he does, too. Can I set something up, completely nonbinding and informal, like the four of us have dinner at Folie à Deux this weekend? What four of us? Greg makes four. How can you go out with Greg in public? He and Elaine have a new understanding, an unspoken agreement not to pry into each other’s personal lives. Their personal lives? They’re married. You know what I mean. So what has it become, an open arrangement? With their kids so young? Not open, in that they haven’t discussed it in those meaningful terms, but they’re having problems and are basically separated for a while. Marlene! Homewrecker! He’s a doctor and you’re a nurse and it’s so predictable. How long do you think this can go on? It’s not about worrying about the future. So are you in for dinner? I’ll arrange it and call you back. I don’t know. What else do you have going on in your love life? My love life. Spoken of as a thing in the world. This guy is not an ogre. I didn’t say ogre. I just think after Stan. Stan was three years ago. Yes but the scar tissue. You owe it to yourself to get out of the kitchen—I mean the house, get out of the house for a change and move forward. I can’t believe you said kitchen. What’s this guy’s name? Roger Nuñez. He’s Latino? He’s many things. Does he speak Spanish? How should I know? Do I speak Spanish? How’d you meet him if he’s so new to the area? At Dee Anderson’s. And I’m supposed to be reassured that you met him there? You know for certain he didn’t lose those fingers because of syphilis? It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a respectable artists’ guild meeting. Roger is doing some work on Yurok blankets with someone else at Humboldt State University from the Native American Studies department, and he was at Dee’s on a purely business-type level. It wasn’t anything weird. Hmmm. Okay, I’ll meet him. That’s my girl.
Sadie scraped the last runny spoonfuls of pancake dough from the mixing bowl and dropped them onto the frying pan. So many calories. One dinner with a six-fingered man wouldn’t be the end of the world. And later that day she might go to CalCourts and do a bit of Stairmaster to counterbalance the morning. Patterns of behavior were only unbreakable if you didn’t try to break them.
The next afternoon she fell asleep while watching a documentary about black lesbian poets, this being one of Roger Nuñez’s academic specialties and so part of her homework before the blind date because with the possibility of love you’ve got to be prepared to meet the other person halfway, give-and-take, and when she woke up she remembered a few of the key phrases used—indigenous liminal subalternism, covert clitorogeny—and the pictures of close-cropped Afros and the loving women who sported them.
She was sweaty and had to take a shower. She was also starving and wanted to have some macaroni salad but thought it would spoil her appetite at dinner, which on second thought might be good. Dieticians recommended having six small meals a day instead of three big ones. Marlene’s doctor boyfriend, Greg, had told her this wasn’t true, although Greg was a philanderer who, if he was capable of cheating on his wife, was capable of cheating on Marlene and other lifestyle prevarications. Sadie worried about her sister and took off her blouse on her way to the kitchen and then felt an empowering self-denial and redirected herself to the bathroom.
There she fully stripped and untied her frosted hair, removed her penny-sized earrings. While waiting for the shower to heat up she faced the mirror and thought of how difficult it must be to be black and gay and a female poet all at once. An incredible quadruple whammy. Yet we were all born with certain disadvantages, handicapped in some way or ways from the get-go, condemned to spend our lives developing strengths to make up for our inherited disadvantages. Obesity, religious unorthodoxy, a big nose, eczema, hairiness, hairlessness, a poetic bent. When it came to gender, Sadie could empathize with black lesbian poets, she could say right on and there was that automatic sisterhood, though when it came to being black and lesbian she was just a honky breeder. Some important circles didn’t overlap.
There was a rustle behind the shower curtain and a male voice said, “Oh, ahhh, what the hell!”
Sadie froze. Someone was in the bathroom with her and the door was closed. She felt a fear so heart-lurching of what was about to happen to her that she couldn’t move. A man was lurking and scheming in her shower, hidden by the curtain but there. Surely there. She closed her eyes and the door was closed. There was the squeak of faucet knobs turning in both directions and the sound of water surging and slowing before shutting off completely. A man’s retching and coughing water and throwing open the shower curtains, the screech of rings sliding along the metal bar, some psychotic onomatopoeia. Sadie knew she should try to defend herself but honestly hadn’t the strength, and the man probably had a weapon. Intent on any number of penetrations, sexual and otherwise: vaginally, anally, orally, or perhaps knife stabs to her back, side, front, head. In her mind’s eye she didn’t so much see someone writhing on top of her as imagine him rubbing her face into the floor in an effort to erase who she was. Wasn’t that what violent people did, tried to negate their victims? She saw herself being uncreated.
With her eyes closed the waiting for something to happen took an eternity. She heard the intruder clear his throat and she thought, Soldered sang of elllllll spot. Waiting for the pain to begin. For it all to go blank. Maybe this would be a swift gunshot to the back of her head, and she was about to go to the Great Unknown. Hamlet says relax. She gripped the porcelain sink as though it were a walker, and her eyes were closed so tightly she saw breathtakingly beautiful kaleidoscope patterns on the backs of her eyelids, swirls of inchoate violets and reds and ambers, whorls of abstract space, splintering intimations of something, yes, strangely and unexpectedly, holy. For she was barricaded in her head now, come what may of this intruder. It got to be so that he didn’t matter. When one door closes another opens. She was given over to a vision bigger and more numinous than her normal consciousness; she would survive the pain and emerge as from a chrysalis. Her body would fail, but that’s what bodies did in the end, and the rest would be ascension. She’d shake off a mortal coil that had only ever been a sidelong glance at what’s most true.
Fifteen minutes later Sadie was in a trance, a victory over the normal din of her thoughts. Fearlessly she opened her eyes and light flooded in and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Just for a moment. Then she was cognizant of looking in the mirror and seeing that there was no one else in her bathroom. The curtain was drawn and the water was off, but there was no man there. She hadn’t heard him leave, though she’d been in a state where noise perhaps wouldn’t have reached her. But why would he do it? What would be the point of sneaking into someone’s bathroom and then leaving without further violence? Sadie was on terra firma again and didn’t know what to make of it.
On Monday morning, in relentlessly white northern California, in a land of milk and no honey, Prentiss Johnson was a black man. As black as he could be. As black as any Eurekan could ever, in the wildest flights of their color imagination, hope to be or become. He worked at the public library in the stacks, was six foot three, weighed a hundred and ninety-five pounds, and had a drinking problem. The night before, he’d said it again to eight of the fourteen people who attended his Mad River Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, “I have a problem with alcohol.” Where were the missing six attendees? Probably on a bender through the saloons of Second Street, bottles of Old Crow evaporating before their very eyes, yelling fuck that! at the idea of rehabilitation and the childish amusements offered by sobriety. Prentiss had looked at the white people, each of them so very white, and said, “Every day is a struggle.” What an understatement. What an outlandish reduction of the thirst, like an infant’s, like the desert’s, that he felt every waking second of his life. I am a drain, he thought, capable of swallowing everything. Eight heads of limp hair nodded up and down as he spoke. “I wish I could say it was getting better.”
A week earlier, Prentiss had been at Safeway to pick up some eggs and a bag of potato chips and wound up patrolling the hard liquor aisle, his brain a crashing wave of foam and confusion, feeling an almost sexual longing for the amber beverages lined up in regulated rows. Whenever he got to the end of the aisle and told himself to turn left and leave, to just put that shit out of his sight, because he knew he couldn’t go back to the way it had been, and the life he’d rebuilt after leaving the hospital could fold without so much as a huff or a puff, he turned around and made another pass at Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam and Lord Ron Calvert—all the old aiders and abettors—and thought the magnet’s not losing its pull. A pretty girl with short black bangs whose Bonanza 88 shirt said her name was Eve grabbed a quart of rum and wandered off humming an unhummable song. It was brighter than day in aisle 11. It was baseball-stadium-at-night bright. And then some fourteen-year-old white kid in thrashed army fatigues and ballistic eyes sidled up to Prentiss trying to be cool, the studied subversion, with a “Hey man, what’s up? Me and my friends outside are wondering if you’d be into buying us a bottle of Cuervo and we’d throw in something for yourself, like such as a few beers?” And the kid was so stoned and had such shitty teeth and stupidly cut hair and Prentiss knew it wasn’t a play at entrapment. Though the point was—yes, the sad truth was—that the kid was angling for a way to jump into the very hole Prentiss was trying to crawl out of.
So tragic. Prentiss wanted to shake him real hard and say, It ain’t like that. It ain’t so easy you getting waylaid tonight and thinking it’s no big thing and all bets are off, all the pain disappeared and you get to feel like some street-corner prince put on earth to fuck and run. Booze is the long-term proposition. Booze sets up residence in you and in return it gets rid of the pain but that’s no fair trade, because the pain isn’t gone it’s just hiding, and while you’re in that limbo and your nerve endings don’t mean nothing, while nothing means nothing, your pain’s developing immunities so that when it comes back it’ll reintroduce itself and there ain’t no movie this scary so that you’re begging for mercy and it’s you down on your knees penitent, and you didn’t mean to let the pain get so big, honest, you were going to bring it back and work with it a little, treat it with respect and figure out what it’s got to teach you. But by then it’s too late. I’m saying, by then the clock’s run out and you can’t ever make a move on your own again. You’re its slave forever on a plantation as big as your mind.
But Prentiss didn’t say this. Instead he ran a black hand over his black face and turned to the kid and walked toward him and said, as gently as he could, “That’s not a good idea for either one of us.” The brightness of aisle 11 was practically blinding, and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafted out of the ceiling speakers, all dulcet tones and why-not-pick-up-some-extra-gum. The kid backed into and overturned a basket of limes and belligerently kicked one of the rolling green citruses and shuffled down the aisle and turned left and wasn’t overcome with the shakes. Prentiss longed to follow him.
This Monday was another gray day, and a cement truck at the corner of Fourteenth and C Streets was grinding the devil’s own bones. They should be handing out earplugs. Prentiss walked by it on his way back from A.J.’s Market, coughing the rising dust and wiggling his right big toe through a sock hole as he passed an old bird-looking dude he saw hanging around sometimes, not doing anything.
Prentiss was expected at the library in an hour and hadn’t taken a shower or had breakfast or done his stepping. The stepping was hard. Pulling an apple pie out of its crinkle wrapping as he entered the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Carl Frost, he took a bite and stared at the fresh copy of Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members sitting on the coffee table. He had no trouble with the first step: “We admit we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.” Wasn’t his totaled car, revoked driver’s license, broken collarbone, and $61,000 worth of structural damage to the Fortuna Doll Emporium building proof enough? And the job firings and estranged girlfriends and chronic fatigue? Damn straight, his life had become unmanageable because of alcohol. As plain as an overhead B-52. But the second step was turning out to be a real barrier in his path toward recovery: “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Now, who in their right mind is going to hand over the steering wheel toward recovery to some Power that might not exist? That was just irresponsible. Prentiss had gotten himself into alcoholism, and Prentiss was going to get himself out. Simple as that. And it was this same “Power” that had allowed every tragedy he could think of to happen, from slavery to the World Trade. Prentiss was supposed to trust his recovery to that? What’s the expression, you must be kidding.
“Prentiss, that you?” called out a voice from the bathroom.
“Me.”
“Could you do me a favor and bring me some paper towels?”
“We out of toilet paper?”
“Looks that way.”
“I wish I’d have known; I was just at A.J.’s.”
Prentiss stuffed the rest of the apple pie in his mouth and took a roll of paper towels to his roommate in the bathroom. “That’s a potent odor,” he said. “Makes my fruit pie taste bad.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, you got a problem there.”
“Mayday, mayday.”
“You owe me money.”
“I always owe you money.”
“You got to put it up front now or they’ll shut down the utilities.”
“We have flashlights.”
“The second due date is coming.”
“We can make fires in the garbage can.”
“Going to turn off the water and we won’t be able to flush your evil shit away.”
“I’ll build an outhouse.”
“Seventy-four dollars, Frost. Today. Seventy-four dollars.”
“But I have to pay Sadie when I see her tomorrow.”
“Who’s Sadie?”
“My therapist.”
“A man’s got to have priorities. Don’t make me look for a new roommate.”
Prentiss went to his room and got out one of his work sweaters, a downy V neck decorated with rows of off-center maple leaves. Pulled on the boots. Patted his two-inch Afro into an approximate square. Started walking across town to the clean, well-lit Humboldt County Library, where the books and movies kept piling up for his sorting pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, right. About as much pleasure as having your balls licked by a cat. A frazzle-haired woman pushing a stroller with no baby in it breezed past him when he crossed the street to the courthouse. He was going to be late. But for seven bucks an hour, did he care? True, the county had given him the job as an alternative to living in a halfway house, and he had to be grateful for the little bit of freedom this allowed him, though it was a chafed freedom, a liberty restricted to fighting his impulse to sit down with a gallon of red wine and let the good times roll. Oh, but it was all sour grapes these days.
Prentiss had been living with Frost for two years and considered him his only close sober friend, though they didn’t do much together besides watch TV and go to the flea market for the distinctive clothes Frost favored. Prentiss didn’t pretend to understand Frost, who in high school had chastised him for not being black enough—the irony of Frost’s being white didn’t seem to matter—but who lately had let slip a few race-is-irrelevant comments regarding affirmative action. Sometimes Prentiss stood in Frost’s room, which had a map theme going on—every square inch of wall space was covered by maps of the world, of Uganda and Estonia and East Timor, of small towns and big towns and mountain ranges and highway grids and famous buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, the Carter House)—for an effect that was like staring at someone’s brain circuitry. His own, maybe. There were stacks of National Geographic on the floor and piles of loud, colorful clothing on the bed and in the room’s corners, as well as newspaper clippings about car accidents. Prentiss would wonder at this cartographic nerve center and then gratefully return to his own, normal room.
The next morning he got up early to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so he poured himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen and was examining the toy mouse that came in the cereal package, when a strange woman walked in and let out a half-second scream.
Prentiss threw down the mouse and tried to see straight. “You a friend of Frost’s?”
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“Carl’s. You a friend? My name’s Prentiss. I was just settling down to some breakfast cereal and found this little Ziegfried the Marvelous Mouse toy come in the package.” He looked from her to the table. Frost never had women stay the night. As far as he knew, Frost didn’t know any women. “It isn’t a regular thing me examining a plastic mouse this early.”
“My name’s Justine. I just met—I mean, yes, I’m a friend of Carl’s. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He looked at her and she stood there zipping her purse open and shut. “You want some toasted wheat biscuits?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”
“It’s back there in the hallway on your left. But at the moment we’re having a toilet paper shortage. I could offer you a paper towel.”
“That’s all right. I don’t live far from here. I can wait.”
“Suit yourself. But there’s nothing so urgent to me as the first pee of the day.”
“I don’t suppose you,” she said, staring nervously at the refrigerator and its magnetized poetry and clipped, careworn coupon. “I don’t—”
Prentiss looked at her in the weak morning light and she seemed about to say something before stopping, removing her hand from the purse, and walking out the door.
That afternoon, Silas Carlton was in the Bead Emporium, staring at rows and columns of bead drawers. He felt the paralysis of choice that struck him sometimes at the grocery store when he’d face seventy-two different breakfast cereals (he’d counted them during one of his twenty-minute stupefactions). There were too many alternatives. Ah, he’d think, give me a Soviet food line any day where I have to take whatever they’ve got. Unburden me of these decisions. By that logic he should have grabbed the nearest cereal and not bothered deliberating over the bran o’s and crispy muesli flakes and frosted chocolate nuggets, but he had preferences—he had tastes—and a bad selection would haunt him until he threw the cereal away and went back to the store, at which point the difficulty would begin again. Other people didn’t have this trouble and were quickly filling up plastic baggies with beads. No hesitation. A silver-haired saleswoman with thin gold-framed glasses sat on a stool holding a closed book of crossword puzzles and staring at him. Silas didn’t like people to pay attention to him while he shopped. Made him feel pressured, like he was being monitored and any deviation from standard browsing behavior—if he spent too long reading a label or talked to himself—would get him in trouble. As maybe it would.
He left the store without buying anything and felt a huge relief, like he’d resisted temptation, though all he’d done was fail to get a gift for his great-niece Lillith’s seventeenth birthday. He walked down and up the dip in Buhne Street—exacerbating but not making unbearable the pain in his knees—and turned left on Harrison and stopped in for a fountain-style soda at Lou’s Drugs.
Beto the Argentinian was at the counter with his long sideburns getting ever longer. He gently patted the stool next to him when Silas approached.
“Silas,” said Beto.
“Beto,” said Silas.
“It’s good for you to join us.”
Beto sat alone and no one was behind the fountain. The aisles of Lou’s were empty. The cashier was gone. The ceiling corners of the store were without security cameras.
“Where’s Lou and everybody?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you just get here?”
“Since two hours ago.”
“There hasn’t been anyone here in two hours?”
“People were here. Lou was here. But they left.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lou wouldn’t just leave the store to be robbed by gangs.”
“No gangs come in here.”
“My point is that there are valuable items lying around.”
“I’m not saying if it were my store I would go away, but Lou is different. He is a smart businessman.”
“I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”
They sat in silence for some time before Silas said, “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, in the morning, early, did you come by my place and peek through the window for a minute and then run away?”
“Me?”
“I’m just curious.”
“You think I spy on you?”
“That’s not necessarily what I’m asking.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay.”
Beto pulled three white gold rings from his left hand and laid them on top of one another on the smudged porcelain countertop. Silas reached around the soda dispenser for a glass that he filled with cola before adding a thick vanilla syrup. Beto stared at the carbonation running up the insides of the glass and whistled. Silas drank it all out of a bent straw.
“You were thirsty,” said Beto appreciatively.
“Yes.”
The front door jangled open and Lou walked in, a short man with a brush-bristle crew cut dyed jet black. His eyes were red from the conjunctivitis he claimed to have gotten from the redwood and marijuana pollen in Humboldt County’s air. It clogged his tear ducts. Although he’d lived in Eureka for forty-seven years, his Georgia accent sounded thicker to Silas than any Southerner he’d ever heard. Lou talked about retiring in Georgia, but he hadn’t been back to visit in over a decade and feared the changes time had wrought. Better the devil you know, he said.
“Lou,” Silas said. “You left this place unattended. Beto and I could have broken into the pharmacy and taken everything.”
“You’d have left fingerprints.”
“True.”
“I went to the police station.”
“What for?”
“My employee Leon—part-time guy—is missing.”
“I read that,” said Silas.
“His mother’s offering ten thousand dollars for his return.”
“They think he’s been kidnapped?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“What’d you tell them?” asked Silas.
“That a couple months back he stopped coming in because of an illness.”
“They think he’s dead?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“You going to hire new help?” Silas said.
“I am.”
Silas left money for his soda on the counter and left. Walking down and up Buhne hurt his knees this time, and when he got home he took pills and lay in bed until his consciousness went blank.
3 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
In a small condominium in Old Town Eureka, Barry Klein dabbed water on the button-sized stain marring the front of his double-knit sweater and rubbed and rubbed it and then draped the sweater over the radiator. He went to the kitchen and placed two apples, a shearing knife, a corned beef sandwich, a pockmarked copy of The God of Small Things, and a thin folded blanket into a wicker basket, his Prairiewalker model Longaberger, and closed the top. It was four thirty and he wasn’t gay. Sunlight dappled the checkerboard carpet on which he rested his huge feet in the living room. The hairs growing out of his two big toes were long and he was ashamed of their coarseness, of their pubic quality. He would never again wear sandals.
A cat meowed from the top of a bookshelf and he said to it, “You could easily be a dog. I could’ve gotten a dog and been happy. It’s a cliché for gay men to have cats but that doesn’t matter because maybe I’ll meet a girl at Rainie’s tonight.”
He thought about eating half the corned beef sandwich, but then thought better of it. As a new guest, he was presenting at that evening’s Longaberger party, meaning whatever he packed was what he’d show, and if that included a half-eaten sandwich, what impression would that make? That he couldn’t control himself? That he was too poor to afford a whole one? That he kept an unkempt home? What a wrong impression that would be. Barry looked at the walls of his one-bedroom apartment and saw the Napa wine poster perfectly aligned with the street-facing window, a photo collage of his family and college friends, the theater masks of laughter and tears, a giant handwritten quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Now hold on. Would he have an Oscar Wilde quote on his wall if he weren’t gay?
“Don’t be so literal,” he said to the cat, which stared at him mercilessly. “Lots of straight people like Oscar Wilde. He has big crossover appeal.”
He shaved again and applied antioxidant cream to the worry lines on his forehead and put on the sweater he’d cleaned, which was casual and said I’m approachable. He really hoped he would meet a girl at the party.
He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows and saw with a sinking feeling that the worry lines weren’t fading despite the diligence with which he daily applied the cream. And the hairline at his temples was getting uneven. And that stain on his sweater hadn’t gone away! What did he have to do, cut it out? Put on a patch? Bleach the whole sweater? He ran more water over it and said to the cat, who had followed him into the bathroom, “Last night didn’t happen so I wish you’d stop thinking that.” He’d been roaming around on the Internet and had paused to graze in a pasture that wasn’t his preferred pasture, not his oriented field, and the stain was proving impossible. “I was just looking around,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The cat sneezed. “Do you understand? Nothing.” The image of loving a man and touching a man and intimate urgent kissing and reaching down to grab an erect cock and his grabbing yours … Tonight he would meet a girl and impress her with his observations about Rainie and the ridiculousness of Longaberger parties—twenty adults all swapping stories about how they use their Longabergers?—but that it was a good excuse to be social without getting drunk or sitting through a dumb movie. He would be supercharming. There was to be an eclectic group of Rainie’s friends with names like Elaine Perry and Sadie Jorgenson and he didn’t know how many of them would be single. But how long can you call it accidental grazing when in your heart of hearts it thrills and excites and fills you up with a longing so pure, so real, so intensely overpowering that you could turn your back forever on the prospect of a tepid marriage to someone you have to constantly tell yourself you’re attracted to, and for what? Social approval? A military stint if he ever so chose? Freedom from fear of Faggot! You like to suck dick, huh? How you like to swallow blood? And bashed skull and helplessness and shame—oh God, the unutterable shame—and self-censure and the imprisonment in a life, a position, a love that dare not speak its name? Barry took off and folded up his sweater and placed it on the dry-cleaning pile. Then he put on another sweater and strategically ruffled his hair so that the thin parts weren’t visible, making perfect his beauty. He felt good. He started crying. Tonight, maybe, he would meet someone.
A few hours later he was ready. The map to Rainie’s house that came with the Longaberger party invitation unfolded on his couch like an origami flower bud, and Barry would have left it sitting there if he hadn’t thought in the back of his mind that he might bring someone home later. Everything in that case should look neat and inviting, so he took the four-square-inch paper to the recycling bag. Then, with basket in hand, he met his neighbor Amphai in the hallway outside his apartment and gave her a light one-armed hug.
“You all set?” said Amphai.
“I feel like one of those Saint Bernard rescue dogs,” said Barry, lifting his basket to his chin.
Within fifteen minutes they were at Rainie’s, where a man neither of them knew welcomed them in. Barry shook his hand and—was he imagining it or did the man thumb-press his palm significantly?—walked into the living room, where he set down his Longaberger next to the fireplace and a cast-iron tool stand in which were slotted a mini-broom, fire poker, and extended-reach tongs.
“Amphai and Barry!” Rainie said, emerging from her bedroom in a knee-length yellow dress tied at the waist, her hair freshly released from curlers. “You’re the first ones. Have you met Alvin? We used to work together at the Cutten Nursery. These things usually start on time, so the others should be here any minute.”
“Hi, again,” said Barry shyly, Amphai and Alvin nodding around the triangle.
“I had cucumber slices over my eyes for two hours today,” Rainie said. “You want coffee? I’d peek a little and it was like I was actually inside the cucumber, you know you get cucumber juice deposits around the corners of your eyes. And what do you think of this dress? I got it and a hoop skirt at the Hop-Hop last weekend for only forty dollars, tax included. The guy who owns that store was in our year at Eureka High, Amphai. Jason with a Spanish last name. Who’s got psoriasis or some really unfortunate skin predicament, but it turns out he went with Sandrine, remember that French exchange student our junior year who everyone thought was a lesbian, well according to Jason they were getting it on for three months.”
“She left a used rag in the toilet once in the gym and I went in right after her,” said Amphai, stirring her coffee. The spoon-on-porcelain nrr-nrr-nrr sound driving everyone a little crazy once they tuned in to it. “There it was like an aborted fetus.”
“That continental charm,” said Rainie. “The exchange students were always so gauche, to use one of their words. Except the German boys and oh God do you remember Claude?”
“With the big cock.”
“Ladies, ladies,” said Alvin, who had a thick, well-trimmed beard and curly black hair styled into a pompadour that Barry thought becoming. “Some of us haven’t had our dinner yet.”
“Sorry.” Rainie poked him in the ribs. “Making you hungry?”
“I refuse to dignify.”
“Then the three of you should sit down and the others will literally—oh, that’s the door. Hold on.”
By six fifteen, twenty people were standing or sitting in the living room, ranch-dipping celery sticks and saying, “the farmers’ market in Arcata is a spent force” and “appalled by my mom’s Tupperware parties and thought I’d have to be lobotomized before doing anything like it” and “broken condom is how she described it to me, not that they won’t love it with all their hearts.” Of the twenty people, eighteen were women.
“Welcome to those of you who it’s your first time at a Longaberger gathering,” said Rainie, pushing a cart stacked with baskets to the center of the room and smiling at everyone. She unpacked the baskets and arrayed them in crescent formation with their identifying name tags in front. The 2002 Ambrosia Combo. The Small Harvest Blessings Combo. The 2005 Founder’s Market Basket Combo. “As most of you know I’m Rainie and I’m a Longaberger independent sales associate, which means that I’m licensed to sell Longaberger products by the Longaberger company itself.” The first of the coughs and sneezes and body mutinies from the audience. “I’m going to give a little historical background and then show you some of the more fantastic models and give you a chance to buy the ones you want. I know that stocking up on holiday Longabergers is one of your main reasons for being here, but I think it’s also important for you all to enjoy yourselves and get to know one another. I’ve made some of my best friends through attending Longaberger gatherings just like this one.”
During the ensuing report on Longaberger history—the inspirational account of an epileptic and stutterer named Dave Longaberger whose learning disability prevented his finishing high school until he was twenty-one, a man who then founded and, against the advice of friends and creditors, sold two successful small businesses to finance his dream of creating the largest basket manufacturing company in the United States—Barry scanned the faces around him hoping to alight on an interesting and attractive person—woman, he meant—whom he might approach after the demonstration. His eyes kept hiccuping on Alvin’s, who for some reason was looking at him, so that he had to yank his gaze elsewhere and settle on, say, Sadie Jorgenson, a generously built therapist with frosted hair and a thin silver necklace buried in the folds of her neck.
The history segued into an in-depth basket-by-basket examination of Rainie’s wares, taking time for questions and for-examples and personal testimonials. Then there were three guest presentations, among them Barry’s, about which he was nervous, though you’d never know it to watch him pull out his Prairiewalker’s items, sandwich and book and blanket. In fact, to most observers his was the most accomplished basket packing, certainly the most comprehensive. With these items you could spend an entire day at Sequoia Park or the Willow Creek River or on a drive in some picturesque part of southern Humboldt. And The God of Small Things as his book choice; yes, this was a man worth getting to know, thought the curvy ladies in attendance.
When it was time for Rainie’s closing remarks, before welcoming the chance to talk one-on-one with people and take their orders and write down their mailing information and email addresses to keep them in the Humboldt Longaberger loop, she thanked her guests and said, “You might wonder what’s in it for me to provide this Longaberger service, and I don’t mind telling you because that’s fair and honest. If I sell $250 worth of merchandise tonight, I not only get my five percent commission but I also get the Inaugural Hostess Appreciation Basket and Protector, which is a beautiful basket, five and three-quarter inches by three and three-quarter inches by four inches, and it has a swinging handle and is woven of alternating red and natural quarter-inch weaving with a star-studded blue trim strip. It’s only available to hostesses this month, so I really hope I make it.”
The semicircle broke up and people turned to one another and asked which Longabergers, if any, they would buy. Barry told himself, The woman with short dark hair who looks like Snow White, and set off in her direction—whatever you do don’t look at him—and passed by Alvin and his heart skipped a beat and—
He found himself staring at a man in his mid-fifties with curly chestnut hair graying at the sides, dressed in a brown open-collared cotton shirt, pleated wool slacks, and bubble-toed black boots. Lived-in clothes that looked tumble-dried and thrown on. Unconcerned clothes. The sort of ensemble you’d wear if you were taking a cross-country train trip and couldn’t bring any luggage. Barry hadn’t noticed him at the party before or seen him walk into his personal space and was frankly a little disturbed to be standing so close to him.
“What is this?” the man said, arching his shoulders. “Where am I?”
“Where are you?” said Barry.
“Wait a minute. This is my old apartment.” The voice, a rock-rake gravelly sound, had panic stabbing through it. The man looked nervously at the trios and quartets of women—and Alvin—eating and making mouthful comments and nodding at the mention of others’ children and husbands and termagant mothers-in-law. He took in and held a big breath.
Barry had heard of drug-addled bums—although drug-addled bums these days were usually younger than this fellow, some in their teens or even younger because the country’s safety net had so many tears in its mesh—wandering into any house with an unlocked front door and having freak-out breakdown sessions in front of horrified, suspended-animation families or single mothers or amorous couples. Too much PCP and THC and LSD—not enough TLC. The bums, having worked toward this moment ever since taking their first cigarette drag or saying bombs away with a bottle of Everclear or tying off with a rubber tourniquet and nearby syringe, were generally unarmed and harmless if you could contain them somehow. The trick was to get them into a small empty room; otherwise they’d accost the furniture or wrestle with the leaf blower while screaming obscenities until the authorities arrived to take them away.
Barry’s first impulse, therefore, was to try to keep the man calm while signaling for someone to call the cops. “You’re at Rainie Chastain’s house, where we’re having a Longaberger party.”
“Longaberger? Those woven baskets?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re saying this is a Longaberger party? I’m afraid—what’s your name?”
“Barry.”
“I’m afraid, Barry, that I’ve lost my mind.”
Barry reached up to scratch his head and made a check swish in the air hoping that Rainie or someone would see it. No one did. “That’s possible. Is there a reason you think so?”
“Yes,” said the man, nodding unhappily. “Yes, there is.”
Barry looked down at the man’s left hand and saw a hand grenade. He knew in a terrible instant that they all were going to die, that this guy was a holdout from the Symbionese Liberation Army, that they were going to explode into a hard rain of body parts and wicker and building rubble, and in that split second Barry experienced superregret at never having admitted to himself what he was just because of social opprobrium and other stupid intangibles. Barry, Barry, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? He knew how it grew and had always been too cowardly to openly acknowledge it and celebrate the strange and wonderful and natural things that grew there. Oh, he had lived life with one arm tied behind his back, he thought as his initial panic ebbed and with a surreal helicopter seed comedown he realized that the round stubbly object in the drug-addled bum’s hand was not a grenade at all but a pinecone. He careened into awareness as the bum shook his head and walked heavily to the hallway leading to the front door.
“Friend of yours?”
Barry looked from the door to the person addressing him. Alvin. “No, I’ve never met him before.”
“Rainie has the widest circle of acquaintances.”
“Yeah.”
They regarded the crowd around them and Alvin said, “Can you take a compliment?”
Barry didn’t flicker with embarrassment when, after a moment of silence, he realized that he was staring hard at Alvin. Blood rushed to his groin and head at once and there seemed to be stability in this combination, a balance struck. He would neither rip Alvin’s clothes off nor pass out. He stood calmly, coolly, and what would follow would follow.
Alvin said, “I really like your sweater.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you get it in Eureka?”
“No, I found it in a catalogue from a very small company in Healdsburg that manufactures their clothes by hand. Feel how much integrity the weave has?” And then he was saying that he had other sweaters like it, and perhaps Alvin wanted to see them—and Alvin did—whereupon the two of them gathered their things. As they filed out of the apartment Barry scanned the crowd and Rainie winked so subtly at him that maybe she didn’t know. Maybe nobody would insert sex into his and Alvin’s departure. And yet—what would it matter if they did? Would he make room in his head for their suspicions when at last he was full of certainty?
The next morning Joon-sup Kim called his friend Hyun-bae for their once-a-month California comparison, a Eureka versus San Diego debate. They had immigrated together to the Golden State from Pusan, South Korea, six years earlier when they were seventeen. Joon-sup, nicknamed Jack by his coworkers at the Better Bagel and only slightly shorter than the average American, with matted hair that hung like coils of moss down his back, lived in a Eureka tenement building occupied primarily by Laotians and Salvadorans who seemed all to have taken a vow of silence. He would step onto the lanai outside his second-story apartment and wave down at a freakishly over-groomed Latino family sitting in the courtyard around a murky half-drained swimming pool, eating papusas, Sunday best on a Tuesday afternoon. Not receiving a wave back, he’d follow up with a hale “Nice day for a picnic, know what I’m saying?” though it might be fifty-two degrees and overcast. One by one—man woman teenage boy little girl—they’d look up at him, never all together, and say nothing before pulling out more papusas from their Longaberger. “Weirdos,” Joon-sup would mutter under his breath and then go back inside his dungeony bachelor pad.
He’d originally moved with Hyun-bae to southern California and then gone north after a vacation had convinced him that Eureka was where he was meant to be. There were trees and a temperate climate and the ease of mobility that only smaller cities offer. The smog was bearable. The people friendly. Plus, Joon-sup was something of a chef and would-be small businessman and had happily noted Eureka’s dearth of Korean restaurants. Which, he discovered upon arriving there and getting a job as an assistant bagel maker and learning more about the area’s cultural and ethnic components, was because there was a dearth of Koreans. Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians, sure, plenty, enough not to render the phrase “northern California Asian population” completely nonsensical, but there was almost no one from his home country.
Hyun-bae liked to lord this over him—that Joon-sup was an island in a sea of round-eyes and boat people—but Joon-sup liked being unique, even if most whites eventually got around to asking him what he thought of Ho Chi Minh and My Lai, and he felt that this was a place where he would become American quicker than if there were a Korean community to fall back on. Here he had no choice but to go to all-night reggae jams and to bonfire parties at Moonstone Beach with the local university kids high on Native American herbs and the urgency of their environmental science major. Here he threw away the preppy stiff-collared shirts he’d bought in San Diego and adopted the local garb: alpaca tube hat, cotton-hemp hybrid long-sleeved pullovers, draw-string calico pants with neo-bell-bottom stylability, hefty mountain-climbing boots with graphite support system. Joon-sup went native.
His parents were disturbed by the pictures of himself he sent home, and by his increasingly foreign intonations when talking to them on the phone, for in his daily life the Korean language had become like a trophy sword kept over the mantel, an unused adornment. He had sex with American girls and seemed so at home in Humboldt that people from out of town pulled over while driving to ask him directions. Once when his van broke down he hitched a ride to a mechanic with a schoolteacher named Elaine who didn’t know the first thing about efforts to strengthen the Environmental Protection Agency’s jurisdiction over the local logging industry, and when he informed her of them she was impressed and asked if he’d grown up in Eureka, which was a flattering question. He didn’t plan ever to visit South Korea again. He was free.
At just after two in the afternoon Joon-sup finished reading thirty-four small-font pages of a loan application for the restaurant he wanted to open, the Joon-sup Experience. His head hurt and he had to go to a rally in Arcata for the Pacific black brant and other migratory waterfowl that annually made a stop in the shoals of Humboldt Bay, so he put down the hefty application and got in his turtle-green Volkswagen bus and put on a music collection of stoned hippie reggae standards about Marcus Garvey and sensimilla and the scandal of the Banana Republics. Lighting a sausage-sized joint, he backed out of his numbered parking space in front of his apartment, running bump over something that turned out to be a deflated football left out by one of the building kids. The joint smoldered as he came to a stop sign and his mother had called in the morning because she had met someone she wanted him to consider. Yes, she knew he was in America now and had adopted certain regrettable American customs and had once said, in a breach of filial respect so extreme it had left her speechless, that he would marry whomever he wanted, be she white, Asian, African, or transvestite, but she had met the most remarkable girl with a university degree and knew Joon-sup couldn’t refuse to just look at this girl’s picture and read her handwritten note about herself. He couldn’t possibly be so insensitive. The package was on its way.
There was a trippy knocking sound in this dance-hall song, like an echoing submarine sonar noise, that was spacier for the subwoofer and thousand-dollar equalizer Joon-sup had recently installed in his van. He frowned at a red light on his dashboard that flickered on and off, thought he recognized the burrito maker standing outside Amigas Burrito, accelerated and worried about his lack of loan collateral, cursed his Asian hair for being so difficult to dreadlock, and figured that the picture of his “intended” would look nothing like she did in real life, that it would be doctored into the realm of fantasy. One of his old school friends worked in a photography studio in Pusan where ninety percent of the customers were women insisting that the studio airbrush to the extent of reconfiguring noses and lightening skin colors and trimming neck widths. Marriage was such a desperate business in South Korea, and what was Joon-sup supposed to do, see the picture and flip and—
Joon-sup snapped to attention. A man was standing in the middle of the road on the outskirts of Eureka, directly in front of Joon-sup’s van traveling at 42 mph. The guy was maybe three seconds away, meaning that Joon-sup couldn’t possibly stop in time, though he slammed on the brakes reflexively as a low scream got stuck in his throat. The man had appeared from out of nowhere, with his legs spread apart like he was about to draw in a shootout. Joon-sup thought, in a spasm of fear, Holy fuck I am going to hit this guy and braced himself for the impact, tensed and skidding and seeing everything in slow motion. His white knuckles on his enormous steering wheel, involuntarily closing his eyes and—
Nothing happened. No kerchunk and smashed metal and street-smeared pedestrian. Joon-sup was merely slowing to a stop just past Kinko’s and a shoe store and a veterinary clinic, beyond the place in the road where the man had stood. Cars honked as they swerved around his parked van. Joon-sup craned his neck in every direction and then looked at the reefer in his hand. He’d had a hallucination. With his Gatling-gun heart going rat-a-tat-tat, Joon-sup shifted into gear and sped up onto the highway. He had to be cool, be cool. Cars continued to gust by and a highway patrol vehicle got a good look at him. Feeling the police stare, Joon-sup looked straight ahead and finally reached the speed limit and tried to seem unconcerned with the fact that he was holding a marijuana cigarette in plain view. It was only a cigar and Joon-sup was just a conscientious driver. But normal people looked around when they drove, so he made some natural-seeming head turns and saw the face of the highway patrolwoman, a Laotian in a flat-topped police hat. He smiled and made a little bow with his chin. She slitted her eyes and moved on.
When Joon-sup parked along the edge of the Arcata Plaza, still shaking, the Humans for the Pacific Black Brant rally was about forty people in clusters around an Earth Mother woman wearing a lavender sarong and standing on a large box with the word “soap” stenciled across every side. Two of Joon-sup’s coworkers from the Better Bagel, Alleycat and Soulbrother, held hand-painted posters with colorful depictions of the black brant in flight. Majestic creatures, rare and fine with white bellies and noble dark wings, requiring large areas of undisturbed tundra in which to stop during their flights between the Arctic Coastal Plain and Baja California. Joon-sup had never seen one of these birds in the flesh, which was compelling evidence that something needed to be done to protect them. He had almost killed someone. Manslaughter. Plans to develop offshore oil drilling along the northern Humboldt seashore—and what a dangerous future the state faced without adequate electricity—were getting daily more serious, so a group of environmentalists and concerned local citizens had come to protest the quick fix of fossil fuel development. He had driven right through a man.
“Jack,” said Alleycat in his feral purr, “what’s the good word?” Alleycat was pot-bellied with a Vandyke goatee and Van Gogh red hair.
Joon-sup shrugged.
“The mayor was here a minute ago,” said Soulbrother, “to bestow his blessing.”
“It was a bestowal,” agreed Alleycat.
“Said the city council has penned a letter to Congressman Sawyer demanding that the oil scouts be held in abeyance.” Soulbrother wore a nest of Ugandan bead necklaces and held a jade-tipped staff in his left hand. Alleycat also had a staff, though his was a weathered piece of driftwood without ornamentation.
“Until it can be proven that the black brant doesn’t nest in the sound.”
“Except that everyone knows it does, so we’ll get a permanent abeyance.”
“It’s crafty and it’s just.”
“The fate of the Pacific black brant is intricately tied to the fate of California itself,” the woman with the microphone was saying. “If we allow its natural habitat to be torn up so Big Oil can come in and bleed the ocean for a few more years of gas dependency, what’ll we have? We’ll have a displaced black brant, which might just be an extinct black brant, and a wounded Humboldt Sound and further retardation of alternative energy research. Will the problem of California’s energy needs be solved by however many millions of barrels of crude oil can be pumped out of our ocean? Of course not. There are far too many of us, and our needs are too great. All we’ll have as a result is a permanently impaired ecosystem.” She paused and looked searchingly at the crowd and someone made a low moaning noise. “Does anyone remember the Bligh Reef in the upper Prince William Sound, where Exxon spilled eleven million gallons of oil in 1989? While efforts to clean it up succeeded in some ways, there were still vestiges left over a decade later, in areas sheltered from weathering processes, such as in the subsurface under selected gravel shorelines, and in some soft substrates containing peat.” A quick scan of the people around Joon-sup showed how unacceptable this was. Peat in the soft substrates? She might as well have been describing child pornography.
Joon-sup clasped his shaking hands behind his back and declined Alleycat and Soulbrother’s suggestion that he get his own staff and join them for a walk through Arcata Park with some pot and a ukulele.
Earlier that day, Eve Sieber applied a darker shade of black lipstick than normal and wandered the aisles of Bonanza 88, noting how little effect the blue-light special on cutlery was having on the store’s business. Despite the ad in the Times-Standard, potentially seen by over forty thousand people countywide, no one was thronging into the place to snatch up low-grade knives and forks and serving salad prongs. Was Eve surprised? No. The metal was cheap and flimsy. The spoons looked likely to bend under the strain of a bite of minute rice, and the forks were too small to provide the fulsome bites of steak and pasta that Eureka’s bargain hunters demanded. Even with prices slashed below cost—and what a minor bloodbath it was—this sale barely competed with the deep-discount chain stores that, because of their size and intimacy with manufacturers, could afford to sell everything at the leanest rates.
Eve returned to the cash register and tried to figure out if she had a cavity in one of her upper left molars and organized the open box of chocolate eggs meant to be irresistible to women in the checkout line. Her manager, Vikram, was hanging a perforated-edged WARNING: GREAT SAVINGS HERE! sign over the cutlery display, a warning unheeded by the four customers listlessly examining paper cups and Limoges Nativity scenes. Vikram was a tall man with movie-star cheekbones and elephantine ears who’d moved to Eureka the previous year to work at a newly opened software development plant but was fired when the company’s abysmal third-quarter earnings report led to layoffs of fifty percent of its employees. Vikram, by then in love with a shaggy-haired lesbian named Callie who worked at a travel store called Going Places, decided not to return to the Bay Area and instead to concentrate all of his psychological and romantic powers on winning Callie’s affection. He described his life as an act of radical romanticism.
“Hey you!” Vikram said to Eve. “Could you do me the kindness to please bring two fishhooks here?”
Eve dug into the display supply box stashed under the checkout counter and brought them to Vikram. “We’re never going to sell all these cutlery sets,” she said, straightening a stack of boxes. “There’s forty more in the back.”
“Forty-four,” he corrected her.
“So much the worse.”
“That is the wrong attitude to have toward this fine Millennium Dreams Cutlery Set. In Gujurat we’d kill to get such inimitable craftsmanship, such loving attention to detail.” Holding up a tarnished knife so flimsy that it almost wobbled, he whispered, “Such a bonanza of practical value.”
The two of them laughed. Making fun of Bonanza 88’s wares was among their favorite activities, though it usually led to an existential despondency—after all, they did nothing all day but sell these wares—from which they didn’t fully recover until the end of the day.
“Do you know the bar Callie goes to, the Pleather Principle?” Vikram asked.
“I haven’t been in it. Why?”
“The man who goes there might have an opportunity of knowing her in a more congenial setting than the Going Places.”
“It’s a lesbian bar.”
“My point exactly.”
“So men aren’t welcome.”
“What if the man looks like a woman?”
“You’d never get away with it and you’d end up humiliated. Maybe even beaten up by some hardcore bull dykes.”
Vikram folded up the step ladder he’d used to hang the sign. “You’re right. You see some things so clearly.”
At lunch Eve went to the back office to use the phone. She had a responsibility as an adult to alert the police about the man she’d met at the Fricatash—not that the police were her or her friends’ most trusted allies, but she acknowledged their authority in certain matters—and so called the sheriff’s office. She was put on hold for twenty valuable lunch-break minutes, at which point she talked to an Officer Fuller, who took her statement and thanked her for the interesting information regarding the Leon Meed missing person case.
“What happens now?” Eve asked.
“With what?” Officer Fuller responded.
“Do I need to identify him or something?”
“He’s not a criminal suspect.”
“I know, but you don’t need me to do anything else?”
“We’ll be in contact if we do.”
After this disappointing act of public service—she’d imagined being enlisted by the police as a consultant—Eve told Vikram she needed a longer lunch hour and then went to Amigas Burrito and talked to burrito maker Aaron Hormel, a primped skater she’d slept with when she was thirteen who now took occasional biology classes at College of the Redwoods and taught himself bass guitar and was someday going to move to Oakland and become either a veterinarian or a musician god. He’d been struck in the throat by a baseball bat in high school and suffered critical injuries to his vocal cords, so that he always sounded like he was breathing in while talking.
“Where’s Ryan these days?” Aaron asked. “I haven’t seen him at the Fricatash.”
“Working at Muir as much as possible where—ooh, listen to this. So last week Principal Giaccone catches him doing junk in one of the bathroom stalls, he was passed out for just a moment, and Giaccone starts fulminating about—”
“Nice word.”
“Thanks. So Giaccone was all, ‘This is a school, godammit you little junkie! You can’t be shooting up when kids are right outside playing basketball. What kind of place do you take this for? How long have you been working at Muir? I think it’s time we reevaluated the desirability of your being here.’”
Aaron sprinkled cilantro onto a Veggie Behemoth burrito. “Did he get fired?”
“It turns out,” Eve said, filling her cup with root beer, “that Ryan had walked by Giaccone’s office the week before and heard him sexually blackmail a fourth-grade teacher, saying, ‘You want to keep your job you’re going to have to fuck me.’”
“No way.”
“So Ryan mentioned what he’d heard and now his job is like lifetime guaranteed with a rosy little raise to boot. We’re going to save up and move to Bel Air.”
“That’s so corrupt. Of Giaccone, I mean. Who was the teacher?”
“I don’t know. Someone new.”
“I used to want to fuck my fourth-grade teacher.”
“Must be something about the job.”
When Eve drove to Arcata after work she almost hit a van in front of her that braked in the middle of the road for no reason, and she was so flustered she didn’t even think to honk and shout about what a stupid fucking reckless bastard its driver was. Saved her voice a workout. In Arcata she sat with Skeletor and Mike Mendoza on the Plaza and there was a political rally going on with some preachy woman and screechy loudspeakers so the three of them left to play billiards at a bar until Ryan joined them and they all did heroin in the basement storage room. All except Eve, who said to Ryan before they started, “After last night do you think you should be doing this?”
“Last night was what, was nothing.” Ryan scanned his arm for usable veins, but they lurked below the surface with Loch Ness Monster furtiveness and he had to then strain his neck muscles to draw out an artery. It was horrible to look at. When he was done Skeletor tied off and shot up and Eve turned away.
“You went to the hospital,” she said.
“I’m fine,” said Ryan. “Don’t be a worrywart.”
Everyone smiled at the word “worrywart,” including Eve, though for her it was a cover-up for feeling impotent and square and abandoned in the Old World by Ryan, who had crossed a chemical Bering Strait without her and was never coming back. And yet he, although gaunt and reluctant to look at her for any duration, knowing that their looks bespoke an intimacy out of place in the new scheme of things, was still the boy she’d once held on to for support and love and camaraderie, was still someone she had all this history with. All this immutable past. For in the beginning, before sex, when they used to meet in a rush before math class so he could copy her homework, his eyelashes impossibly long, the pencil eraser with which he poked her in play, the friends who couldn’t distract him, his fingers grazing hers as they breathlessly reached for the classroom door, there had been a grander understanding than any she had thought possible. The kind found in storybooks. The kind found in pop songs. What was now but the lie of happily ever after, the emptiness of I’ll always love you, and what could she do but act as though it weren’t the saddest dissemblance imaginable?
“Worrywart, okay,” she said, “but going to the hospital is serious.”
Ryan was already melting with Skeletor and Mike into a bed of broken-down cardboard boxes as soft as fur, the three of them there in body but not in mind, placid and imperturbable expressions on their faces. Eve thought it was like a drink before the war, a decision by them to forget tomorrow’s difficulties and instead to live in the moment by escaping it. Eve thought it was a way of disappearing and she would, if she could, give anything to keep Ryan from that fate.
That afternoon in Eureka, Lillith got on the bus after her McDonald’s shift ended. She stared out the window until a man in a fishing vest sitting across from her asked for the time. The bus pulled up to a stop at Seventh and J. There was nothing behind the plastic bus shelter but a barren lot on which even crabgrass was having a hard go of it. A large black man climbed on board, scuffing the corrugated floor with his boots, and funneled change into the fare machine that made a satisfying burp when it tallied up a dollar. The black man sat behind Lillith and softly whistled “Greensleeves,” which was odd to hear on a bus and very pleasing. Despite its lacking neopagan or even pagan connotations, it evoked for her a pastoral world in which there was a place for magic.
“You ride the bus a lot?” the fisherman asked her, for he was one of those guys who made conversation. Like it was his trade and he felt a professional obligation to talk to everyone about anything, though Lillith knew he did it not out of duty but because of a need to feel comfortable around strangers and because of a certain restlessness that drives people to reach out. She understood the impulse; she was often uncomfortable and wanted to be extroverted and would have said things like “You ride the bus a lot?” if she could.
“No,” said Lillith, who was in her McDonald’s clothes and aware of how alien they made her—uniformed people away from their jobs always seemed displaced and slightly suspicious, like escaped prisoners—“but today no one would give me a ride when my shift ended.”
“The bus’s not like it used to be. Doesn’t give veteran discounts and doesn’t go out on Cutten Road anymore.”
“Yeah, it does,” said the black man, who’d stopped whistling. “I’m going to Cutten right now.”
The fisherman leaned to the left so that he could see past Lillith to the black man. “Don’t you go to my AA meeting?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen you there in a while,” the black man replied.
The fisherman said, “I’m on a rickety wagon. Keeps throwing me off.” The black man didn’t smile. “But I’ll get back on. Scout’s honor.”
Lillith gazed out the window at the passing Memorial Building with outdated MIA and Bring-Back-the-POWs posters and, at the end of Lincoln Street, Eureka High School, where she was in her junior year, though she could be a graduate student it felt like she’d been there so long. A beautiful man boarded the bus and sat in a window seat where Lillith saw him in profile, the slender eyebrows and golden skin and strawberry mouth. He had a thin white scar on his temple and messy brown hair. She coughed loudly and he didn’t look her way. She knew she wasn’t in his league, but still it would have been nice to see him head on. Life was a million desires unrequited. And Sam. Sam wasn’t worth her obsession given how many options she had; really Sam was just a terrorist who’d taken her thoughts hostage and wouldn’t let them go, had even stopped negotiating for them, had cut off all communication and gone underground and so where could she begin to track them down? It was a crisis, but crises passed.
“Take care now,” said the fisherman when she got up to disembark.
At home her sister Maria was on the phone and she had to wait two hours before being able to check her messages: Tina and Franklin and still no Sam and this was the absolutely last day she would accept him so he was throwing away a chance at immense happiness. Whatthefuckever. Tina was waitressing at the Red Lion Inn lounge when Lillith called her house and got into the stupid nitpicking conversation with Tina’s brother about when she was going to give him free stuff at McDonald’s. Then she called Franklin, who told her that he and she and Tina needed to talk about the Wiccan convocation from the night before, that she wasn’t going to believe what had happened. Twenty minutes later he picked her up and they drove to the Red Lion Inn with the car almost dying at every stoplight, Franklin putting his hand on the dashboard in a faith healing gesture.
They walked in and Tina waved at them from where she stood distributing beers to a table of six white-shirted guys near a television broadcasting the prize fight out of Las Vegas. The television was muted with closed-caption subtitles for the hearing impaired. The white-shirted guys studiously read the black-outlined words scrolling across the bottom of the screen, their faces like stock traders’ in the Pit when the markets rumble, and then shouted their agreement or disagreement or bafflement at how the commentators could say something so stupid about such a clear punch, and then went back to reading and beer drinking.
“Who are those people?” asked Lillith when Tina came over on a two-minute break to sit with her and Franklin.
“The kitchen staff of Shanghai-Lo. They come for pay-per-view stuff.”
“None of them are Chinese.”
“Shanghai-Lo isn’t so authentic. They get all their recipes from a 1960’s edition of The Joy of Oriental Cooking. I’d never go again if I didn’t love their fried wontons.”
“Those are good,” said Lillith.
“So what are you guys doing here?”
Franklin said, “I have to tell you about last night’s convocation.”
“He’s being mysterious about it,” said Lillith. “On the ride over he didn’t say anything. And I begged.”
“You didn’t offer me a blow job.”
“There’d have to be something for me to blow.”
Franklin smirked and tapped his thumbs together and said, “So we start off at the convocation talking about the RenFair next month and this ayurvedic bookstore opening in Arcata and how there’ve been more attacks on neopagans in Kansas, and then Kathy stands up and she’s in full effect with the sequin gown and the sapphire rings and the head wrap and she looks, you know, the complete sorceress, like she’s ready to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms out of a glass of water, and she makes this speech about how a local guy named Leon Meed is on the Astral Plane right now, as in at this very second he’s over there with the Goddess and the Horned Consort and all the spirits.”
“What do you mean on the Astral Plane?” asked Tina. “A live person?”
“She says he’s been there for a week.”
“How would a live person get to the Astral Plane?”
“Kathy thinks the Horned Consort took him. The guy is a burl sculptor, and she says the Horned Consort fell in love with his statues and kidnapped him. She says she doesn’t know for sure how it happened. But what’s even more bogus is that Kathy thinks the guy is going back and forth between here and the Astral Plane. Then she challenges us to come up with a spell to bring him back. She gives it to us as an assignment, like we’re her students or something.”
“And then someone put her in a straitjacket?” asked Tina.
“You know how people never confront Kathy. And the thing is, a guy named Leon Meed really did go missing last week—there’s a police investigation—and people have reported seeing him since then, which according to Kathy is proof positive.”
“She gives witches a bad name.”
“We just sat there when she was done explaining it. She wants to have a special meeting on Sunday to talk about our strategy for rescuing this guy.”
Tina waved at her manager, who was pointing a finger at his watch from behind the bar, and mouthed “I know I know” and said, “I’ve got to get back to work. Maybe we should find a way to excommunicate her, if she’s going to keep saying such dumb things.”
“It’s not dumb,” said Lillith quietly.
“What?” said Tina.
“It’s not dumb. I’ve seen him.”
“Seen who?” said Franklin.
“The guy who disappeared, Leon Meed. At a show at the Fricatash last Friday. He was talking to that girl Eve you know she’s going out with Ryan Burghese? and then he disappeared.” As Lillith said this she looked at the table in front of her and saw an ampersand crack in the table’s surface.
Tina waved her white dish towel at her manager like a peace offering and stood up. “Very funny. I’ll see you later.”
Lillith didn’t indicate in any way that she was joking, and when Tina left Franklin said, “You’re not serious.”
“I am. You can not believe me but I saw him. And if other neopagans are saying that Leon’s on the Astral Plane, then that makes sense to me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before now?”
“I thought it was because I was drinking. I thought, I don’t know what I thought. But the point is we’ve got to help bring him back if that’s what Kathy’s saying. We’ve got to cast the spell.”
“You’re becoming a Wicca fundamentalist.”
“No, I’m not.”
Franklin said, “Hmm.”
Lillith said, “Hmm.”
Then they smiled and they’d been best friends since they were five-year-olds and there were some things that they instantly forgave in each other.
4 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
“Jim!” said Shane. The third annual Boys in the Wood racquetball tournament was in midcontest at CalCourts, where Shane Larson and Jim Sturges stood next to each other in line to get shower towels from the front desk. Broad-bottomed women in stretch pants and sports bras strode purposefully to their aerobics workouts and weight-diminishing sauna sessions. Their thighs and hair were massive. Televisions tuned to different twenty-four-hour sports channels perched on all four walls like bird nests, a permanent squawk, competing for the attention of exercisers and exercise-hangers-on standing below, where the semifinals of the racquetball C division were about to begin on courts 3, 4, and 5, and the judges were being asked over the PA system to take their positions in the observation areas. “Man,” said Shane, raising his voice a chirpy octave, “it’s been forever. Where are you living these days? I’m married, did you know that?”
Shane was a changed man. He knew Jim would be expecting the old Shane: the Shane with skinhead leanings who sometimes beat up middle-aged men with families just because they were middle-aged men with families, the Shane who’d once dropped seven hits of acid and baseball-batted his way into a Rolls-Royce parked implausibly in downtown Eureka in order to defecate on its virgin-calf leather upholstery before being arrested. But eight transformational years had passed since they’d seen each other, during which Shane had embraced his family’s Mormonism, the Larson faith for three generations already, and become an upstanding citizen.
“I didn’t know that,” said Jim, smiling mechanically. “Congratulations.”
He has no idea how far I’ve come, thought Shane, who dispensed with the small talk by saying, “I’ve stopped drinking and smoking and extramarital sex.” He stared penetratingly at his old friend. “Those were a fool’s paradise.”
“I see,” Jim said.
But did Jim see? Could he comprehend the metamorphosis? He’d never been as ultraviolent and antisocial as Shane, and in fact he’d been something of a wet blanket about fighting and unprovoked cruelty back in high school, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been a sinner. Because he had. Jim had fornicated with abandon. He’d drunk alcohol to the point of bodily harm. He’d had godless ways. And although time could also have changed him, Shane didn’t think it had. No, Shane didn’t see salvation in Jim’s tired, distracted face.
Shane said, “I’m working now for Morland Memorial Services. It’s customer relations, some floor sales. I’m selling caskets mainly, but recently I’ve been getting contracts to do land plots. It’s a growth industry. The baby boomers are nearing their time. What’d you say you’re doing?”
Jim got his towel from the putty-chinned receptionist and gave it a quick inspection. “I’m in Los Angeles. Just home visiting for a while.”
Shane tried not to think about Jim’s inability to appreciate how far he’d come since they’d known each other in high school—because it was a major failure of imagination—and instead he thought about the business opportunity presenting itself. Let the past be the past. His great insight was: friends and acquaintances could be customers, and vice versa. “I know what you’re probably thinking in LA,” he said. “You’re probably worried because you have no idea where to be buried in such a huge city, right? I mean, down there where you don’t know anybody and everything’s so anonymous. It’d scare me to death if I was you.”
Jim stared in the direction of the change room and said, “Honestly I haven’t thought about it.”
Shane tucked his towel under his arm. “That’s what I’m saying. Why would you when the thought’s so scary? Being buried in some big city all alone? Jim, you’re going to want to come back to Eureka when you die, where your roots are. I think we should talk about this; I think it could be good for us. How long are you in town?”
Jim pivoted on one foot, his body aching toward the showers. “Not long,” he said.
“Let me give you my card.” Shane pulled out a buttermilk business card with blue embossed lettering: Shane Larson, Associate Sales Representative, Morland Memorial Services, 555-2432. “What’s your number in town? I’ll call you.”
“Actually I’m busy for the rest of my visit, so I’ll have to get ahold of you later.”
Shane, knowing that Jim hadn’t a clue how to conduct himself righteously in the eyes of God, that he was, spiritually speaking, a directionless person in need of guidance, said, “I have a better idea. We’ll talk it over in the shower. I can get you a great price on a site right now. You like the Humboldt Overview Cemetery? Who doesn’t, right? Imagine a place on the hill there, overlooking the bay, in a gorgeous casket made of beautifully contrasting white pine and mahogany, and with a crisp gold satin lining. Think solid mahogany swing-bar handles and sliding lid supports. Jim, I could take you down to the store after we shower and show you the displays and we could settle this today. Can you imagine how good you’d feel?”
Shane was really in the zone now, was in one of his total empathic mind melds, for despite his religious advantage over his erstwhile friend, he was Jim Sturges at that moment, seeing what he saw, anticipating the relief of putting the whole burial question to rest and maybe opening himself up to a higher power.
“Thanks,” Jim said, “but I really don’t have time.”
“It isn’t for me that I’m asking this. It’s for you.”
“I’m sure it is, but seriously. I’m not interested.”
Shane closed the gap between them by six inches and spoke quietly, confidentially, importantly, as sports commentators droned in the background, “Jim, death isn’t one of those things you can afford not to think about. You may want to, and you may get away with it in the short term, but it’s there waiting for you. I don’t know if you know this but I’ve become a Mormon, and that’s because I had a big realization a few years ago that we’re not here forever. I know what you’re thinking, news flash, right?” Brief chuckle and then po-face. “But it had never really come home to me before I was in my car driving along and I heard on the radio about a guy down in Matole who ran out into the street to get his son’s basketball and was hit by a car. Died on the spot. And I got to thinking, I don’t know why, it was just pressing on my mind, but I began to think about what it meant to run into the street to get a basketball, a reflex motion, your mind on what’s for dinner and how it’s time to mow the lawn again and a new soreness in your left knee, when wham! you’re dead. You don’t see it coming even though you know it has to eventually. Death is an invisible speeding train and you’re standing on the track somewhere, you don’t know where exactly, could be far down by the river or could be two feet away. It comes back to we all have to go sometime. And where we go depends on what we choose to do while we’re on this planet. You need to ask yourself. The soul and the body. Have you planned for them? You can either take out insurance—and we’re talking a tiny premium, month by month you won’t even feel it except as a feeling of comfort and security—so that you know you’re covered, or you can be a miser and end up rotting in the ground in some anonymous city with your soul burning forever.”
Shane had never expressed it so eloquently. He’d linked—pull the metal chain, feel its strength—his own personal epiphany with burial services and the afterlife. This matter of supreme importance—this primary undergirding—made him both vulnerable to scorn—people always sneered at the truth tellers, for guilty consciences are drowned out by nothing so well as jeers and ridicule—and strangely confident. After all, Shane was only human, he was an insignificant mortal, but the magnitude of God and of his duty to Him were commensurate. Shane was conjuring the infinite, evoking the ineffable. He felt measurable in joules. To decorate His crown.
Jim draped the towel around his neck and crossed his arms—what a tell! what a giveaway that he took this seriously and felt implicated!—and said, “I don’t want to offend you, and I’m sure your death episode was the real thing, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. When I die I’m going to donate all my organs and be cremated. But I appreciate what you’ve said and I’m going to leave now. Good to see you again.”
Jim walked away and Shane stared after him. How can anyone be so tone deaf? Obstinacy is what it is. Denial. People’s hearts get hard. They refuse to see anything but their own version of things. Sad, really. Sad.
So sad that the more Shane stood there thinking about it, as bruised racquetball players filed past him to get towels and chat with the counterwoman and buy a compensatory light beer, the angrier he got, like who the fuck do these people think they are? They’re handed truth on a platter and do they accept it graciously, maybe even appreciatively because after all it is their immortal soul that’s in question, I mean excuse me for trying to save you from the eternal fire, or do they refuse the platter and say, No thanks, I’m not in the mood? Not in the mood? I don’t want to offend you blah blah blah, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. Doesn’t resonate? Like faith is some kind of bell that you ring and if it doesn’t produce the right echo, you put cotton in your ears and head for the hills? I’m going to leave now. And did you see Jim’s face when he said that, with that left-lip sneer that was part disrespect and part you’re-a-nutcase-who-has-to-be-handled-delicately-or-you’ll-detonate? It was so condescending, and who was Jim anyway but some nowhere man living in LA and thinking that he was cool enough to dismiss what was most fundamental as pure hokum? Like, Save your fairy tale for the local rubes who don’t know better.
Shane’s fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms and he felt heavy and congested. He hadn’t had an alcoholic drink in four years. He turned to the counter and ordered a Budweiser. His wife, Lenora, was walking around Old Town in Eureka with her parents, who were visiting from Salt Lake City for a week, getting ice cream at Bon Boniere and trying on Celtic outfits at the Irish Shoppe that he would be angry if she bought. They pooled their finances now, which basically meant that Shane paid for everything since he was the only one with a job. He finished his beer and, an old habit rising from the murk of memory, squashed it into a thin disk on his right leg. I appreciate what you’ve said and I’m going to leave now. What a patronizing son of a bitch.
“Hey,” he said, addressing the counterwoman, “I need another one, on my tab.”
“You know we send an itemized bill, don’t you?”
“You think my wife pays the bills?”
“Just thought I’d mention it.”
It was like he’d never been away. After four more beers Shane was feeling the old body carbonation, like there were air pockets in him rising, making him a light and humming creature, clearing his brain and his vision and the space between him and any challengers out there. I’m sure your death episode was the real thing, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. Shane laughed and ran a hand through his short black hair, exposing its advanced widow’s peak. He rubbed his beak-shaped nose. Did Jim think he could treat Shane like a fool and then no hard feelings? Whoops, didn’t mean to shit all over your most sacredly held beliefs, see you around. Shane stacked the five aluminum disks on the counter and walked toward the showers. Pushed through the swing doors and into the steam of the locker room. A bunch of bald fat fucks sitting astride padded benches talking about you should have heard what counsel for the defense wanted to plea bargain with, and I was netting sixty a year on property speculation in Tahoe until the county increased regulations on undeveloped land that was more than thirty percent forested. Shane passed them by and stepped on the bare foot of a lobster-faced man resting his elbows on his knees, and when the man yelped in pain Shane told him to shut the fuck up. He was six foot four and his muscles were so toned and there was so much strength in his every sinew every atom and he was so light he could just fly up to some obstacle and overpower it yes because he was energy he was forward momentum and woe unto him who denies the truth and that’s what that fucker Jim was he was a truth denier and it was people like him who kept the whole world from achieving peace and brotherly love and the fruits promised the human race by a benevolent God. One bad apple. Past the sinks and the weigh scales and the towel closet, through more swinging doors and Shane was unswervingly determined, like a Tomahawk missile, to find his target. But Jim wasn’t in the showers or the saunas or the hot tub and Shane checked everywhere twice and he was forward momentum.
“Hey,” he said, pausing in the hot tub room, to the tub’s only occupant, a bearded man leaning front-forward into a white water jet, “you see a guy in here a minute ago who’s got brown hair, in his mid-twenties, looks like a real yahoo?”
The man turned his head to face Shane. “Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen you in here before. What’s your name?”
“Alvin.”
Shane was floating there, surveying the scene, the mist rising from the tumultuous water and Alvin Driscoll facing the back wall of the hot tub with his pelvis positioned where water was surging out and wasn’t that weird. “What are you doing?” Shane asked. “Are you sticking your dick in the jet?”
Alvin slid away from the jet and was visible only from the neck up, his curly black hair thick with water droplets. “No, I was just—Nothing.”
“Yes, you were. You had your dick in the jet.” Shane’s eyes gleamed with rheumy mirthlessness and he was light light light. “What are you going to do, cum into this public hot tub and anyone who gets in it later will be taking a bath in your sperm? Do you know how disgusting that is?”
“I don’t know you. You’d better leave me alone.”
“And what are you going to do about it, huh? You fucking queer. I bet you sit in here and stare at everybody’s dick while your own dick’s in the jets. Oh, man, that’s—”
“Leave me alone.”
“ ‘Leave me alone,’ yeah all right.” Shane turned to go and put his hand on the door and then stopped. “Just one thing first. Stand up. I want to see if you’ve been sticking your dick in the jets of this public hot tub. Just stand up. If you don’t have a hard-on, then fine, I’m wrong.”
“Go away.”
“I’ll kick your ass, you little faggot, if you don’t stand up right now.”
Alvin didn’t move, and within a second Shane flew into the water—he was all energy—and pulled him up by the armpit and saw that Alvin indeed had a flagging erection, all varicose veined and darkly pink, whereupon Shane began hitting him, first on the side of the head and soon Alvin’s ear and cheekbone were bleeding in a diluted smear of sweat and mist and blood, then in the chest and the groin and back to the face—great thumps and Shane’s knuckles were aglow with pain and light—and the smacking sound on the wet skin was like a horse whip and a few blows glanced off though most of them connected and with one well-aimed swing Shane heard and felt Alvin’s nose snap which precipitated almost immediately Alvin lowering his guard and slumping into the water on the verge of losing consciousness. Shane was lifting him up again for more comeuppance when he felt two huge men—weight trainers on the CalCourts staff—on either side of him in the hot tub, grabbing his arms and yanking them sharply behind his back, so that Shane screamed with pain as he was dragged out and into the locker room for ground restraint. Pinioned on the floor, his eyes thrashing about in their sockets, he saw Jim Sturges at the edge of a group of onlookers staring down at him, and he thought, There’s Jim Sturges. I hope he gives me a call soon, because I could set him up with a nice spot at Humboldt Overview Cemetery. The soul and the body. Doesn’t he know that they’re one and the same?
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