by Josh Emmons
“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?
Lying there with heavy breathing all around—the big guys were really in a lather now—he relaxed and gave himself over to what came next. He ceded control to Him, ready once more to do necessary work.
That morning, Elaine Perry had woken up forty minutes before school was to start with a tingly dread that she hadn’t done something she was supposed to do the day before. Oh God, what was it? Call her mother on her birthday, pick up her friend Beth’s mail so that it didn’t look like she was out of town, pay the rent to her irascible and threat-happy landlord? Or was it something closer to home, a kind word unsaid to her son Abraham whose failure to make the intramural basketball team wasn’t because he was too short but because he wasn’t any good? Despite the effort. Despite his putting on shoes whose price per square inch was higher than a Pacific Heights mansion’s, and his grabbing the two-tone ball, and his walking seven blocks every day after school to practice at the recreation center near the marina, where she knew from his clipped “all right” when he got home that it hadn’t gone all right, that he’d flailed about while his sure-footed peers grabbed and dribbled and shot and rebounded and left him increasingly untrusted on the Outside. But did she press it? Did she tell him what he already knew, that nobody gets good at anything unless they pick themselves up again and again after falling down? Or did she suggest that he shouldn’t knock himself out on a sport that may not be his thing, that maybe he’d be better at soccer or lacrosse or even ballet? Or, what was desirable given the attraction and repulsion of both of these approaches, did she instead say nothing and hope that he learned from this while she explored job opportunities in southern California and instructed her once-a-week yoga class and went to neighborhood parties for a night of how-are-you, the most disingenuous question in the world? While her marriage to Greg was so very ended.
She went on to have a strange day at school. During lunch she was alone for five minutes in the faculty lounge with Principal Giaccone, where to avoid intimacy she’d complained about the insoluble clumping of powdered nondairy coffee creamer to the point where she was sincerely angry—she read aloud the creamer’s ingredient list as though filibustering—and Giaccone’s smile faded and he stopped voicing his agreement and started regarding her like she was a park bench bag lady. Then others came in and she slipped away and felt it all unraveling. Ten minutes in a bathroom stall, hugging herself and staring at the dented toilet paper dispenser. Just three weeks before, she’d pulled off a sexual derring-do with Giaccone, and where had that strength come from? Why didn’t she have it now? The graffiti on the bathroom wall was alternately innocent and enraged. Joseph is cute. Brenda is a bitch needs her ass kicked. Elaine felt alternately innocent and enraged. Oh to be unwavering in the face of what threatened you.
After she left the bathroom she went to the South Pacific dress rehearsal from four to six o’clock in the gym, where the disturbance happened.
“I just,” said Petey, the only student not wearing his costume, “if I go to Bali Ha’i and spend all this time with Bloody Mary’s daughter, then it’ll look like I’m in love with her.”
“You are in love with her,” Elaine said, pleased that the boy cared about the plot of South Pacific but dismayed that he grasped so little of it. “The point of ‘Happy Talk’ is that you and she fall in love. And when you sing ‘Younger Than Springtime’ to her, it’s a love song about how lucky you are to have found her. In fact the play is about your love affair as much as it is about Nellie and Emile’s.”
Petey nodded and then shook his head. “Yeah, but my girlfriend’s going to see it and I don’t want to kiss Alice in front of her. It would be, she’d be mad, plus Alice is kind of I don’t know, I don’t want to kiss her.”
“This is a play. People do things in plays that they wouldn’t do in real life. The audience will know this. Your girlfriend will know this. Besides, you won’t actually kiss Alice. You’re going to be behind a tree so that it only looks like you’re kissing.”
Elaine hoped she didn’t sound too impatient, because if Petey dropped out—and the cast’s collective morale was hitting lower and lower nadirs—the show would not go on. It would be the end of her directing venture, which might prompt the school board to try to override Giaccone’s decision to keep her on, and it would be impossible to find another job midyear, and Greg was going to fight whatever alimony figure she and her lawyer suggested—he’d come right out and told her to expect a Crimean War divorce—so she had to keep these kids happy.
Elaine called everyone to their places and Petey, whom she imagined was a popular eighth grader given his relatively clear skin and height and regular features, did the scene admirably and with a certain enthusiasm she hadn’t seen before, and she thought another disaster had been averted. Every now and then the other shoe doesn’t drop.
“All right,” Elaine said in the midrange shouting voice she used to direct, “that was great, Petey. Take a break. Now could I have everyone who’s in the ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ scene come to the front of the beach, please?” From different conversational circles five girls gathered before an eight-foot-high construction-paper backdrop with a custard-yellow sun and palm trees and gold sand beach; three of the girls looked bored and one nervous and one eagerly attentive. “This time remember to keep your elbows up when you’re pretending to wash your hair. It’ll make it look authentic since we can’t actually get your hair wet.”
“Do I really have to do that lame two-handed wave during the ‘wave that man right outa my arms’ part?” one of the bored girls asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s so lame.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I don’t feel it. I know it.”
“This is a musical. It’s about larger-than-life gestures. Think West Side Story—wait, no, don’t think that. Think Moulin Rouge or Chicago and how animated everybody is in those. We want to be full of energy, full of life. The thing about musicals is that they’re an answer to boredom. People in them get excited doing even small things as a way to show that life can be fully lived and not just tolerated. You girls are at an age where you still get worked up over boys and clothes and music, but as you get older those passions dry up and living becomes a chore instead of a chance to love and be connected with others and do something worthwhile. Age drains that from you. Musicals are replenishing.”
God, she sounded morbid and unbalanced and old and proselytizing for a genre she didn’t much care about. The attentive girl nodded and the nervo
us one looked worried and the bored ones made weak efforts to stifle their laughter. Elaine felt like an idiot in front of the almost-laughing girls. She wished she could concentrate on the girl who was sympathetic to her instead of on the haughty girls’ ennui and disdain, on a contempt that shrank her like an Alice in Wonderland pill. She told herself to snap out of it. There was no need to fixate on the negative when the positive was just as real. Shift your thoughts a little. And then suddenly an older man was there onstage doing a backward dance with his arms windmilling between the girls and Elaine, and he fell to the ground on his elbows. Elaine forgot about her humiliation. The man was unshaven and looked rabid and desperate, like a mistreated animal recently uncaged.
“Excuse me?” Elaine said, walking over to him and gesturing for everyone to stand back. “Excuse me but this is a closed rehearsal. What are you doing here?”
The man looked up at her and got hesitantly to his feet and took erratic steps as though playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Well, it’s not okay. Now get out, please. I don’t recognize you. You don’t work here, do you?” She was responsible for the safety of eighteen children and each was so vulnerable against the world’s deranged. The man looked like a prisoner of war. In theory Elaine felt goodwill toward crazy people, she empathized with their state of permanent conundrum—and which of us doesn’t feel that our own semipermanent conundrum could upgrade to permanent at a moment’s notice?—though in practice she felt uncomfortable around them. They smelled bad and said insensible things and were depressing to look at. And although they usually didn’t mean any harm and suffered from a serious disability, which meant that Elaine had a moral imperative to help or at least to understand them, facing this scruffy man made her mad.
“Where is here?” he asked.
“This isn’t twenty questions. Out. Now. Let’s go.” Without thinking, Elaine clapped her hands three times and then pointed to the exit. “There are children present. Can you summon the decency to leave before you scare them to death? I have nothing against you personally, but—but how did you get in here, anyway?”
The man slapped the dust off his pants and didn’t make any threatening movements. “Something strange is happening to me. Is this a school?”
“Muir Elementary.”
“Yes, you’re right. And you are?”
“Elaine Perry. Now I really—”
“My name is Leon Meed.”
“Could you please leave?”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
She stared at him crossly and with a slight body tremor he moved in the direction of the exit, sidestepping two of the boys who played sailors. They regarded him like an enemy stowaway they’d let escape—what was their captain thinking?—and Elaine’s heart beat so quickly she might have had tachycardia. In large enough doses fear was a stimulant; instead of passivity and restraint it inspired conviction and courage. The man carefully closed the door behind him after failing at first to do it when his coat got in the way. This minor difficulty of his reminded Elaine of her father, of a similar disorientation. Minds and bodies gave way. Strength was humbled. The proudest were brought low. A King Lear growing inside of every adult. And as she balanced the relief she felt from surviving the confrontation with her sympathy for its protagonist, she felt that sometimes we get exactly what we need from situations that promise nothing.
At the Eureka Public Library, Prentiss Johnson picked up and loaded onto his rolling cart two oversized children’s books, a guide to crocheting, a biography of the apostle Paul, and a style magazine telling middle-aged white women how to dress, decorate, and entertain other white women who bought the same magazine. He was in the reading lounge, where people perused books and periodicals until they fell asleep and then groggily woke up and did little self-alerting head shakes and walked away in a greater or lesser hurry, leaving whatever they’d been reading in unordered heaps on the coffee tables placed there for this purpose. Prentiss’s job was to clean up the mess left behind. His was a rage for order.
“Hi, Prentiss,” said Mary Ellen, his supervisor and the woman who met with his parole officer to talk about Prentiss’s work habits almost as regularly as he did. She was in her early forties, full-figured for her petite frame, wore her hair in a bun, had big horn-rimmed glasses. You didn’t look at her without thinking that she was playing up the librarian stereotype, someone who looks so exactly as you’d expect that it has to be an act.
“What’s the forecast?” he asked.
Mary Ellen looked at the recumbent kids and adults and shelves upon shelves of books with little gaps needing to be filled where things had been taken out. “Heavy travel guides early in the morning with some scattered magazines around noon. By midafternoon there will be clear stacks in the history, life science, and advanced mathematics sections.”
“It’s incredible how you do this.”
Mary Ellen sifted through the books on Prentiss’s cart. “We still haven’t gotten back any of our witchcraft or magic books. I checked and a patron named Franklin Strosser has had all of them for eight months. Some of the kids are getting upset. I don’t know how many overdue reminders we’ve sent him.”
She clucked her tongue and left. Prentiss pushed his cart to the children’s section and began inserting books into their call number slots. He had to meet this dude Alvin after work on account of Alvin was going to be his new AA sponsor. Since his drunk driving trial ended two months earlier, his second such arrest that year, Prentiss had been attending meetings five nights a week, two hours a session. Every spare second he had outside of work he was in a meeting. He took to calling himself Mr. Meeting and would say, rubbing a little lotion onto the ashy patches of his skin, finding a knot in his neck and massaging it out, “Mr. Meeting, what shall we discuss with the people this evening? Our love affair with Chivas Regal? Those one-night stands with Cutty Sark? The tenderness of a twelve-pack of Coors?” At his second-ever meeting, when he had to choose a sponsor to be his moral support and on-call advisor, he chose Jamal because Jamal was black and had a born-again commitment to sobriety, a real fire in his eyes when he discussed the evils of the sauce. Man wouldn’t touch root beer. Took Prentiss aside and said, “The others here, forget them. Some are giving it the old college try, but let me tell you they possess weaknesses that’re going to topple them; they carry thirst in their souls they ain’t never going to quench. You stick with me and I’m a help you put a stopper in the bottle for good.” But then Jamal sustained a workplace injury that may or may not have happened because he’d been drinking, and the AA leaders suggested that Prentiss select Alvin as an interim sponsor. This fruit-at-the-bottom dude who never said anything at meetings except to thank everybody for speaking—“Thanks, Sherice,” Alvin would say, “I know just how you feel, I think we all do”—and he’d smile sometimes at Prentiss in a way that was probably just friendly but that could be read in other ways, too. The Little Engine That Could, now that was a classic. Bona fide. As a kid, Prentiss would stare at the anthropomorphized hero of the book, a train with a round face and big shiny cheeks and bug eyes, as the train struggled up the steep hill, and Prentiss’s fists would clench in solidarity and hope. It was a powerful story, the underdog triumphing over adversity in the end. Prentiss was an underdog, and just like the Little Engine That Could he’d planned as a kid to fight his way to the top against crazy odds, maybe become president of a business or an anesthesiologist someday. His aunt Edwina was an anesthesiologist. But then life interfered. Life introduced him to the world of spirits, and now he was struggling to get out.
From the children’s section Prentiss rolled his cart to the fiction and nonfiction territories, and then back to the drop-off bins, where more books awaited him. The hours passed. He took a break on the library’s roof and had a grilled turkey sandwich and called his mother to see if she wanted to see a movie that evening but she was wracked with the arthritis pretty bad and didn’t feel like going anywhere. His s
hift ended and he said good-bye to Mary Ellen and the people at Information who were always debating the merits of this movie versus that movie, never books. On his way out he stopped at the computer station to check his email.
“Excuse me, but I’m signed up for this computer,” said a woman behind him.
“I don’t see your name,” Prentiss said, not looking back but instead pointing to a clipboard with a blank signup sheet on which people wanting to use the computers put their name and the time.
The woman picked up the clipboard and then set it down. “This sheet is empty. There was one on top with my name that someone must have stolen.”
“I work here and there’s lots of so-called thefts and what have you, but nobody ever runs off with the signup sheet.”
He turned around and gave her a shame-on-you look.
She folded her arms. “I was here for twenty minutes and just went to the bathroom for a second. There was a woman at this computer and I was in line behind her.” The library lights flickered for a few seconds and stabilized. “I just have to check if I got a certain email. Can I do that very quickly, please?”
“If you’d’ve asked nicely from the beginning instead of pulling some imaginary jurisdiction, I might have said yes. As is, I’m inclined to sit here till closing.”
“I didn’t lie to you. Someone really did steal that sheet.”
“You only making it worse for yourself.”
Prentiss had started to feel playful but stopped when he saw the woman’s eyes water. She didn’t say anything, just opened her mouth a little so she could take deep breaths without making any noise and then turned around and walked away. Some people get all in a huff, take things so personally and it’s on account of their being so sensitive. Overemotional. Too human for their own good. Prentiss felt a twisting inside and got up to follow her.