by Josh Emmons
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 woul
d 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 thr
ough 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.