by Josh Emmons
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said when he caught up with her at the exit door. “You go on ahead with the computer. I was just playing.”
“No,” she said. She was crying formless tears, smiling politely. “This isn’t because of the computer. I’ve been— It’s personal. Thanks, though.”
Prentiss wanted to give this woman a cup of hot chocolate. Why, he didn’t know. Lots of people out there had their sadnesses and inexplicable pains and he didn’t go out of his way to help them along. But there was something about this situation, and then also—
“Don’t I know you?” he said.
The woman’s complexion had red patches at her temples and the tops of her cheeks. She was pretty in the way you thought old Dust Bowl women were pretty, the ones Prentiss had seen in the Walker Evans photographs that led off Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an interesting book that some codger had left out one afternoon. With a tan, flat, freckled face, she was maybe thirty-two and had big searching blue eyes that were as light and dark as dusk. Chin-length straw-colored hair that curled up at the end like musical notation. She wore a navy blazer and black slacks.
“I don’t think so,” she said, rubbing away her teary mascara and leaving grainy erasures across her red temples. War paint.
“That’s not a line I’m giving you,” he said. “I really do think … I think we— Oh yeah, I remember.”
She frowned and stepped out of the way of an older gentleman with a walker and examined Prentiss’s face closely. “You do? When was it?”
But Prentiss was shaking his head now and smiling. “That’s cool, we don’t need to get into it.”
“Oh God, was it at the Jambalaya last month? I was drinking and my friends said I did some stuff on the dance floor. Embarrassing stuff.”
“No, wasn’t there. If you can’t remember, that’s all right. Nothing illegal.”
The woman made a face like she’d swallowed a bug. “Oh God. I remember. We met at that guy’s house, didn’t we? Yes, we did and you were in the kitchen with the toy mouse. Oh God.”
“My house, too. Me and Frost are roommates.”
“Oh God.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t know him and we met at the Rathskellar and neither of us has called the other and it was such a sleazy encounter all around.”
“If it’d make you feel better Frost doesn’t usually bring women home.”
“What if you don’t tell him you saw me?”
“I could do that. But first you got to do me a favor.”
The woman squinted as a patch of sunlight hit her eyes. “Oh yeah?”
From the wariness of her voice Prentiss could tell she thought he was trying to hit on her, and he felt bad. Not because he really was hitting on her—the thought hadn’t crossed his mind—but because now that it had crossed his mind he knew what her reaction would be. He said, “I want you to go in there and use that computer. I was just fooling around on it, nothing dramatic. You go back inside and check on the email. Grows like the national debt you don’t watch out.”
The woman deliberated for a minute and then smiled and held out her hand. “I’m Justine,” she said.
“Nice to meet you again. I’m Prentiss.”
“You work here?”
“For a little while now.”
“And you get to be around books all day.”
“I do all variety of fun things like put back the same How to Get Rich Without Trying book every other afternoon. I figure by now this town must be about a hundred percent lazy rich people.”
“I’m not one of them.”
“When a copy of the book comes back I can put it aside for you.”
“Sounds too good to be true.”
“It is.”
After another handshake they went in opposite directions, Justine to learn that she hadn’t gotten a job she applied for, and Prentiss to discover that some sponsors are better than others.
That night Sadie Jorgenson got a call from her sister Marlene right before leaving the house telling her that Roger Nuñez had to postpone their date because he’d come down with pneumonia—it had been, he thought, a harmless chest cold until his doctor called and gave him the test results and ordered him to rest in bed for a week—and she’d said that was fine and agreed to reschedule for Christmas Eve.
“It’ll be more cozy this way,” said Marlene, “and we’ll have lots of eggnog.”
“I’m holding my breath,” Sadie said.
“He wants you to know how sorry he is—he held off until the last minute because he thought it was just a minor little thing, but now that he knows it’s pneumonia he obviously can’t risk putting you at risk.”
“Nope. Can’t risk risk.”
“I’m glad you’re taking it this way.”
Sadie changed back into her bathrobe and lay on the couch with a candle burning beside her on the floor. Why hadn’t she told her sister about what happened with the intruder in the bathroom? Because she’d been delusional, that’s why. She was obviously under a lot of stress and susceptible to little aberrations in her sanity, so that the mountain of sugar she’d ingested that day had nudged her over the edge. In a court of law she’d use the Twinkie Defense. No biggie. She’d soon be right as rain. And yet she couldn’t help thinking that those fifteen minutes—or however long she’d held the sink and zoned out—had brought her near to a Higher Power, she wouldn’t presume to guess which one, but some Thing against which death and the physical misfortunes that await mortals are meaningless—that those fifteen minutes were a sliver of experience capable of teaching her all that she needed to know. She thought of yogis and inspirational speakers and church leaders and drug dealers and everyone else who claimed to bring people to more elevated states of mind. She understood their appeal for the first time in her life. They claimed to see further and promised that there was sufficient space for you and everyone you knew to join them. They said, the more the merrier. Sadhu Indians hanging from flesh hooks, delighted. Sri Chinmoy Kumar Ghose stopping his heartbeat and opening his eyes. People swept up in the Rapture. And pharmaceutical ecstasy giving you access to benevolent dopamine impulses you’ve starved and neglected in the unmapped parts of your mind. Will you just look at that row of unmolested charity over beyond the fence of your neuroses? And that orchard of tenderness just above the field of affection growing without care or manipulation, waiting for you to discover it?
She woke up from a semidream and the late-afternoon light in her bedroom was a gentle transition from the idiotic abstractions she’d just thought of. She made and ate a pot of lentil soup, followed by a tomato and half a carrot and twenty-two frozen ice-cream bonbons that she thought she’d thrown away. You thought you’d thrown away dessert. That’s funny. She got on the Internet and chatted with people who believed that these were the Last Days, millenarianists who’d been abducted by God and told exactly what to expect of the Earth’s next phase. Despite her professional contact with people suffering from various emotional problems, she had never met anyone as overtly loony as these people with names like Shepherd 45677777, and whose faith in something Out There that was about to reassert itself on our desolate planet made her smile.
Sadie stared at the computer. “He touched me,” wrote one nameless person, “and my body exploded into mist, and I rose into Him.” This was exceptionally weird and sexual and Sadie loved it. It continued, “He told me that we will not have to wait much longer, for how can anyone look at mankind’s sins such as the depleted ozone layer, the proliferation of bar codes, and state-funded abortion, and not recognize that we’ve come to the End?” To this list someone added talking dolls, ethanol-enhanced gasoline, full frontal nudity on cable, captive animals at aquatic theme-parks, nuclear testing, and the Church of Scientology. Shepherd 45677777 responded, “The Book of Revelation lays out John’s vision very clearly, and it is encouraging. We may expect a thousand-year reign of peace once our age of vice and wickedness ends. We
may expect to be compensated for our suffering. Be grateful that He touched you, and know that very soon He will touch all who are in preparation.”
Sadie went to the freezer and there were no more bonbons and she quietly withdrew from the Internet chatroom. She had to find something to do that evening and forget she’d ever had that embarrassing hallucination in the bathroom. It was, now that she thought seriously about it, simply the latest manifestation of the low-level anxiety that had compelled her toward psychotherapy in college. Ironically, given that she wrote prescriptions for and received samples of every selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor on the market, and had tried a large percentage of them, she hadn’t found a chemical solution to the problem yet. She told herself to give it time.
After dinner Lillith Fielding ensconced herself in the bathroom, where both of the pregnancy tests she took came up positive. She was sixteen and had had sex with precisely one boy, Eric, a month and a half earlier. In a brief, spastic experience of which each later gave opposite accounts, they kissed and groped in the sunken TV den of Eric’s house while his parents slept two rooms away. Eric’s erection was unpredictable and kept failing at the attempted moments of intercourse, which he blamed on the pressure he’d been feeling from the wrestling team in light of the upcoming state championship. Lillith was understanding and cooed into his ear that whatever happened or didn’t happen was all right, and then she tried a few stimulation methods recommended by Cosmopolitan that didn’t work. Only after she gave him an exhausting blow job and tickled his anus was he able to work his way into her for a minute of unsatisfactory jiggling before his inspiration failed again and he shrank out, cursing the tyrannical coaching style of Mr. Fitzpatrick. Practically in tears, he gathered his clothes and hurried from the den, leaving Lillith to get home on her own. They hadn’t spoken since, though Eric the next day had bragged to everyone that he’d “maxed Lillith out.” She had corroborated nothing and now regarded him as a stupid and sad little person. In fact, she’d only decided to sleep with him in order to make that other stupid and sad little person, Sam, jealous.
But her pregnancy was real. In the middle of her Wiccan preparations, of her crusade, of her youth, an evening’s botched sex had made her a potential mother. She lay on her bed staring at her McDonald’s uniform and feeling stomach cramps. Probably psychosomatic, though pain was pain. She dialed Eric’s number and hung up when his mother answered. Abortion. She located Planned Parenthood in the phone book. Or would she keep it, or give it up for adoption, or drown it in a brook after giving birth alone in some isolated woods? How could she have been so dumb as to get pregnant? What a way to fuck up her life. What a way to fuck up.
“Lill?” called her mom from the hall.
“What?” answered Lillith.
“Could you come out here, please?”
“What is it?”
“Could you just come out here?”
“Could you just tell me what you want?”
“Don’t make me ask again.”
Lillith got up and put a hand on her belly and winced and opened the door and saw her makeup-less mother. Things that go bump in the night. “Presto.”
“Could you please tell me what this is?” Her mother held up a purse.
“Dead cow hide,” Lillith said.
“It’s my empty purse.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know why it’s empty?”
“Because you bought me a really expensive present? Oh, Mom, you shouldn’t have!”
“Guess again.”
“Because you think I stole your money.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, I’m only asking. Maria says she hasn’t touched it.”
“That girl and you believe her? After the alleged B she got in biology?”
“I’m posing the question in a civilized way. Did you take forty dollars from my wallet or not?”
“Not.”
“Okay. That’s all you need to say.”
“To go from being innocent until proven guilty in this country.”
“Let’s not start.”
“Fine with me.”
Back in her room Lillith called Tina, who stressed that the time and place to have a baby was not here and now, that Lillith had to get an abortion because otherwise she’d be an unwed teenage mother and the scourge of society and unable to fulfill her responsibilities as a witch. There was so much to do and see in the world, and they were still so young, and a baby would spoil everything.
“That’s really clinical and selfish-sounding,” Lillith said. “This is a human being we’re talking about.”
“Not yet, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Don’t be dumb.”
“I was dumb before, now I’m just pregnant.”
“So don’t be dumb again.”
At five thirty the next morning, Joon-sup and sixteen others marched in single file along a fire lane through a predawn grove of old-growth redwoods four miles west of the Avenue of the Giants. They were bent forward under the weight of their sleeping bags and freeze-dried foods and tools of protest, an encampment on its way to camp. The inspiration for the march was Pacific Lumber’s recently announced decision to log twenty thousand acres of land far enough away from Highway 101 that no one would hear or see it. It was to be an out-of-sight-out-of-mind operation. And to show that it was acting in good faith and interested in viewpoints other than its own, Pacific Lumber had listened to the concerns of environmentalists and tourist boards and then passed these concerns on to unbiased and rigorously nonpartisan scientists whose impact assessment in the end favored the proposal.
A stray cicada sang an uncopyrighted tune. The ground beneath the quiet marchers crunched and crackled with twigs. The walkers’ silence was measurably pitched not because they didn’t have anything to say to one another—they could have talked for days about spontaneous cilantro, for example, or the neurohypophysial effects of meditation—but because they weren’t going to turn this protest into another episode of drunkenness and fevered coupling. They’d decided to keep their behavior on a Beefeater level of seriousness, unlike protests in the past that had devolved into everybody getting overly friendly and forgetting the reason they’d gotten together. People having too good a time had compromised those protests’ effectiveness, in the aftermath of which critics had said, “That didn’t accomplish anything. You can’t serve both God and man.” Therefore there had been a call for a return to gravity. After all, Gandhi hadn’t handed out tabs of acid to everyone who showed up for the Salt March, and Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t arranged for kegs of beer to be at the March on Washington. This outing was going to be as solemn and sober as the crisis and solution called for; no one was going to enjoy themselves while saving these twenty thousand acres of pristine forest.
Joon-sup was grateful for the strictures placed on this social activism because it meant there wouldn’t be any drugs to make him possibly trip out so hard that strange, older, open-collared men would show up from out of nowhere and scare the shit out of him.
That night, after a flavorless dinner, Joon-sup sat about a campfire with the other protesters. There was no discussion of sex or honey-glaze body rubs. No juggling, hacky sacks, victimless jokes, games of hide-and-seek, ghost stories, lines of blow, or shared television memories. In the spirit of their protest they confined themselves to talking about fluctuating yearly rates of deforestation and the successful tactics of past tree-sitters. People were in bed by eight thirty. No one coupled up and conjoined sleeping bags. Everyone used roll-up air mattresses, but there were so many rocks and serpentine tree roots rippling over the ground that it was hard not to think of the Princess and the Pea while shifting in vain for the perfect position.
The night passed wretchedly, and eventually the gray dawn light was bright enough for Joon-sup to see most of the surrounding forest clearly. A few people were zipping up their bags and munching on trail mix and smoking cigarettes and performing their ablutions
with little cups of water they’d filled in a nearby stream. Joon-sup got up and stretched and scratched his stubble and felt an accordion note of soreness in his legs and back. Luckily, coffee had passed the fun censors, and a guy in army fatigues brewed it over a small fire. Something slithered in the bushes; something squawked in the sky.
“Hey, Jack,” said a woman in what looked like a potato sack, stirring yellow mush in a mixing bowl by the fire, “how’d you sleep?” Her name was Barbara and she sounded like she was recovering from laryngitis, though she wasn’t. In addition to being one of this group’s few lifelines to sixties radicalism, one of the great former menaces to Berkeley traffic, she was the mother of Soulbrother’s girlfriend, who had backed out of coming when her dog began coughing the weekend before. Barbara had remarked sadly that her daughter demonstrated the relaxed commitment of today’s political activists, that progressivism wasn’t making progress.
“Barb,” Joon-sup said, tapping the tin coffee cup he’d taken from his bag with a strong forefinger, “beautiful morning.”
“Isn’t it?” The mush was grainy with black flecks of (one hoped) pepper and clung thickly to the sides of the bowl. “The dew makes everything look like it’s in the produce section of the Co-Op, you know those little mist sprays that cover all the spinach?”
Joon-sup knew but made only a tiny nod.
“I heard we might get arrested today,” Barbara said.
More bodies stretched into sitting positions around them, resisting the temptation to sleep all morning. They had to get up and organized.
“Really? I didn’t think the cops would come until tomorrow morning at the earliest; that’s what John said.” Joon-sup had to urinate and thought of almost hitting old men in his van and ignoring his mother’s desire that he get married and taking a nap and the stories of past protesters who’d been pepper-sprayed by the police. They were thoughts made painful from tiredness.
“John said that?”
“Yeah.” Joon-sup looked around for a trail that would take him to a secluded pissing place. “He said that the South Fork Police Department called him before we left and said it’ll happen as soon as they can requisition the vans to take us away.”