by Josh Emmons
Barbara tasted the mush and made a smacking sound.
Joon-sup set down his cup and left the camp. Once beyond sight of the others he stopped at the crux of a pair of trees and was about to relieve himself, but then decided to keep walking farther into the forest. The invigoration of morning, the hunt for pure quiet, the reward of walking for no other reason than that it felt good to move among these stately trees so early when the air had an organic stillness and cleanliness and cloister calm. He stepped over a well-regulated flow of ants. He examined a patch of clover and didn’t find any with four leaves. He saw deer shit and banana slugs and miniature stands of running bamboo. He heard the morning dove, ruff, and sparrow. It was a place without noisy conflict, like the Japanese rock gardens scattered around Pusan. Coming to a gathering of moss-covered redwood stumps, where to the right a single two-hundred-foot giant redwood roared up to the sky, he sat down to tie his shoes. He was starting to get hungry and hoped that the yellow mush would be eaten when he got back so that he could dig into the prepackaged snacks. He was starting to think that he’d like not to return to camp, but instead to keep walking until he came to an exit.
“Hey!” came a voice from above.
Joon-sup looked around and then up in the direction of the call. “Oh, hey!” he said, standing and stepping away from the tree to get a better view of the man addressing him. “You’re already up there? Did you come with another tree-sit crew?”
“My name is Leon Meed,” the man said. “I’m starving. Do you have any food?”
“They sent you up without anything?” Joon-sup didn’t see any provisions slung over the branches or tucked away in a woodpecker hole. It was just this person Leon up there. Usually tree-sitters were outfitted with enough to eat, drink, stay warm, and read for a week at least, even if they were only expecting to stay up for a couple of days. The idea was that the ground crew—people who volunteered to bring the tree-sitter supplies—might get arrested or detained by security guards hired to starve the tree-sitter down, and so there should be extra everything in case they couldn’t come back for a while.
“It’s hard to explain,” said Leon, “but I wasn’t sent by anybody. I should say, nobody I know. The fact is that I was sent here, but the sender is unknown to me.”
Joon-sup would have said something like “You speak in riddles, old man,” except that this Leon might be crazy. Wrecked by too much outdoor living or too much booze or too much intellectual lassitude. Joon-sup considered heading back to camp to tell the others about this guy who was possibly a danger to himself. “Why don’t you know who’s responsible for you being up there?” he asked.
“Because I’ve disappeared,” said Leon.
Joon-sup nodded as though he agreed, but then said, “You look visible to me.”
“No, I mean before. Until a little while ago I lived in Eureka and then suddenly I was being deposited in different places all over Humboldt County. I’m being transported but I don’t know why or by whom.”
Joon-sup nodded again. “I can get help for you but you’ve got to promise not to do anything dangerous like jump. Do you promise not to jump?” He moved slowly, as though Leon were a bird and any sudden action might make him fly away.
“I’m not insane,” Leon said, “and I’m not suicidal. I am literally disappearing and appearing randomly, and I’m very hungry. I need food. So far I haven’t been left in a grocery store or restaurant; it’s either been out in the ocean, where I froze and almost drowned, or in the middle of the street in Eureka where I almost got run over by a van. Or—”
But this was impossible and Joon-sup didn’t want to hear any more and a sick feeling collected in his stomach, like a sack of sludge had been emptied into it. He’d heard enough. Middle of the street in Eureka where I almost got run over by a van. He pressed his palms flat against his ears and created a suction that he built up and dissipated several times, humming as he did so. He rubbed his eyes and his forehead and the base of his spine. He stood up and hopped in a circle with his eyes closed. This was not happening. He was fine. He was all right. He was not out of his mind. He shouted, “I am alone!”
Then he opened his eyes and stopped hopping and breathed deeply in and out and listened. Silence. He was indeed alone. He had only to look up at the tree to see that no man sat there asking for food and describing having been almost hit by a van. He had only to look. But he didn’t. It was the marijuana, clearly, that had done this to him. And the magic mushrooms. There was nothing wrong with the man in the tree, because there was no man in the tree. Against his better judgment then he slowly looked up with the most fervent of hopes and saw, dishearteningly, Leon staring down at him.
“Of course you don’t believe me,” said Leon. “I nearly don’t believe it myself. But I believe my stomach, and I believe the feel of this branch underneath me; I’m not about to slide off to test whether or not I’ll hit the ground. Many things could be happening. I could be asleep and you’re just a part of my dream, or you could be asleep and I’m a part of your dream, or something even more extraordinary is afoot.”
Joon-sup said, with a twinge of sadness, “I thought I was going to hit a guy in Eureka when I was driving my van a couple of days ago. He looked like you, and he disappeared. I hope somebody is dreaming; I hope it’s me.”
“Aha! So you’ve seen me out there? Somewhere besides here?”
“I think so.”
“You think! Yes.” He scurried along the branch to the tree’s trunk. “Maybe you could help me.”
Joon-sup said nothing.
“I’ve been reported missing. I know that. My name, again, is Leon Meed. First of all if you could get me some food that would be ideal.”
Joon-sup stared up morosely at Leon and didn’t think, because thinking led to such unacceptable conclusions—that was the word, unacceptable—and then he headed back in the direction of the camp, to get food or crawl back into his sleeping bag to cry, he wasn’t yet sure.
5
Silas and Eve lay on adjacent reclining beds in the Humboldt Plasma Center, hooked up to IVs that extracted their plasma at the rate of one pint per two hours. They were the only donors on a dark and wet Wednesday afternoon lit up by occasional lightning over Humboldt Bay, God flash-photographing His creation. They nibbled on cookies from a plate of frosted gingerbread men and gingerbread men crumbs on the table between them, though generally they were motionless in front of a low-volumed television. The guy who’d checked them in and set up the equipment was either distracted or simply bad at sticking veins with needles, for he’d missed Eve’s major arm artery twice, producing a massive bruise at her elbow joint, before finding it. He’d left the room quickly thereafter.
“I get so lightheaded sometimes giving plasma that it feels like I’m in an antigravity chamber,” said Silas during a commercial break from the drama they were watching about twin children orphaned in Newfoundland.
Eve looked at Silas out of the corner of her eye, the way you’d surreptitiously look at someone who talked to himself in public. Her arm throbbed in pulse time. “Yeah,” she said.
“It lifts my spirits even,” he continued, while on TV a truck the size of a small cloud climbed a steep, rocky mountainside as its sticker price flashed in solar yellow. “Imagine having a truck that powerful,” Silas said softly. Blood drained from him into a plastic sack shaped like an ice pack, trickling cells. For providing necessary plasma to patients all over the county and country, he and Eve were being paid twenty dollars. The money meant little to Silas—he had adequate savings from his bike shop business and the dividends of wise stock investments—it was more the feeling of This is a way to fill up my hours that doesn’t make me think about me. Because he was tired of the endless ego that confronted him in his retirement; yes, he’d been around himself for so long and knew his thoughts so well, could anticipate what he’d think before he thought it—and what a horrible skill this was—that he relished any chance to do something not for his own benefit. A r
efuge from the self. After this he would go to Ramone’s and order a small coffee and play chess with an albino man who lived on government assistance with his mother. An opponent with natural chess inclinations who wore sunglasses that made his thoughts on the game impossible for Silas to read, a man who feared the sun with vampiric intensity. But before those chess games, as in right now, lying in this building just off Harris Street, where buses passed by at fifteen-minute intervals taking the day wanderers like himself wherever they needed or aimlessly decided to go, Silas was feeling a buzz. Now as at other times he was caught in a mind-body frisson that wiped clear the layers of accreted dust and sediment on his brain and made him see things anew. It wasn’t just the blood donation making him lightheaded and euphoric: no, ever since the morning he’d sat on his recliner and watched a man disappear he’d felt like a tabula rasa capable of psychospiritually recording more than he’d ever known. It didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing—he could be walking through the public library or sitting on his haunches at the Arcata Sanitation Marsh, staring at egrets and rubbing dirt between his fingers—the feeling was the same. Like being in an anechoic space without parameters, without confines. He breathed in and it was the oxygen of eternity.
“I watched a documentary on leukemia recently,” he said to Eve, “that discussed how few people give blood these days. After the World Trade Center attack, people came out in droves, but now we’re back to the way it was.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Eve, “I’m pretty involved in this show.”
Silas shifted on his bed and scratched his stomach. He focused on the television for a few minutes. “Why would someone who hates children so much run an orphanage?”
At this Eve smiled and looked at him. “I don’t know. I was wondering about that.”
“Then you’re a threat to television. They don’t want you to wonder about that, or about how realistic is it that your average person who buys a truck is going to go off-roading up a mountain. My name’s Silas. What’s yours?”
“Eve.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Are you from Eureka?”
“Third generation, thoroughbred Humboldt County. My pedigree weighs a ton.”
“This is a good place to be.”
Eve tilted her head. “Not really. My parents moved to Oregon nine years ago and I went with them, but I came back after a month because I had this idea that I loved it here.”
“When you were fourteen?”
“They put up a fight, but I won because I could yell louder than my mom, and my dad can’t handle confrontations very good. I lived with my friend Miranda until I finished high school.”
“Eureka’s a magnetic place. You wouldn’t have wanted to leave your school friends.”
“Eureka’s hell and my friends are in arrested development. I wish I’d stayed in Oregon or gone anywhere but here.”
“That’s a desperate thing to say.”
“This is a desperate place. And now it’s too late to leave. Eureka’s put a spell on me.”
Silas said, readjusting a leg that threatened to go to sleep, “You sound like someone staying in a bad marriage for no good reason.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Silas raised his left hand. “Falling out of love is the same whether it’s with a person or a place or an object. With a person, at first you’re madly in love with them and then a year later—or twenty years later—you look at them and wonder how you ever found them attractive. Romeo and Juliet were lucky to die when they were so young and in love. They never got on each other’s nerves and turned into Montague versus Montague, case number 4387, Honorable Judge Vanzini presiding.”
“I guess so. You’re a weird guy.”
“You’re not the first to say that.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
They nodded at each other like neither could agree more, like they felt exactly the same. On TV dolorous Canadian children planned to escape from the captivity of their orphanage. The plasma attendant entered the room to check on the progress of Silas’s and Eve’s contributions, which he found satisfactory before saying nothing and leaving.
“Is this your first time donating?” Silas asked Eve.
“Yeah. I would’ve done it sooner, but my boyfriend isn’t clean—he doesn’t have AIDS, but he’s used needles before, let’s put it that way—so for a while I thought, Who knows? I should get a blood test first. So I did, and I’m okay.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah, it’s a big relief. I get to get old.”
“Old isn’t the end of the world,” Silas said.
“It seems like the worst fate there is, no offense.”
“You’ll get over that feeling. The only difficulty is the little recessions, the bifocals and the forgetting of things you used to know. You adjust, though.”
Eve twisted her body toward Silas without disturbing the IV. “But aren’t you sick of adjusting? I adjust to jobs I hate and my boyfriend losing it and my favorite bands breaking up and my rent increasing. Circumstances change and I get disappointed and so I adjust and make do with less. I don’t know if I can handle fifty more years of it. I can’t afford to lose that much more.”
Silas looked at this girl. At her glossy skin—oily would be the unkind word—that she rubbed with her palm to remove its sheen. And the tiny blackheads surrounding her nose ring. And her lips slightly ajar and without lipstick, the upper full and the lower drawn in as though to protect her teeth from scrutiny. He took into account the room’s unflattering lighting, which meant that her youth and comeliness were probably better evidenced at other times of the day, in other settings, though seated here he could see an approximation of what she’d look like at his age.
“Don’t think of it as a lump sum,” he said, “as fifty years of compromise. At a certain point your responsibilities become a kind of pleasure, when you raise children and discover what you’re good at. It’s not all about lowering your expectations. And what I’ve found is that you get back some of the power you had when you were young. Certain abilities you didn’t know you’d lost return to you.”
Eve frowned. She’d begun noticing halos around lights at night and so would have to save up for an eye exam and glasses. Breast cancer had been diagnosed in women as young as her. She occasionally thought there was a gap in her hand-eye coordination. “Like what?”
“Do you remember as a child your senses were more alive? Food was sweeter and music clearer and occasionally you saw things that other people couldn’t? Certain phenomena were revealed only to you, and you kept it to yourself like the whereabouts of a secret treasure. It was as if you could slip in and out of a state of grace. But then as you got older you repressed that receptivity. You lost out on the world of the imagination and believed in whatever was agreed upon as the real world. I’m saying that that receptivity comes back.”
Eve was a little uncomfortable being alone with this man, whose rapt expression was too rapt, whose eyes were too beady. “So your senses are more alive now?” She thought of Derivative’s dolphin song and eeek-yiiik screeched in her brain. She thought of Leon Meed, as though he’d swum up from Atlantis, asking her what day it was.
“Have you ever experienced something that can’t be explained rationally, heard music that wasn’t playing or seen an object that wasn’t there or felt a presence in more than just your body, the way that amputees feel heat and cold in their lost limbs?”
“No.”
Silas looked at the lying girl and said, “There’s wonder still in store for you. Life isn’t all a downward slope.”
Eve said quietly, “Have you considered that maybe you’re insane?”
Silas’s smile was bittersweet as he turned what was left of his attention to the jubilant escape of two orphans from captivity. Eve saw it too but comprehended nothing.
Because it was the Yuletide season, and the last day o
f school, a Thursday, Elaine Perry, whose consumer sympathies lay with the locally owned and operated shops of Old Town, guiltily toured the mall’s discount clothing stores for the presents she knew her sons, Trevor and Abraham, didn’t want—they wanted toys, and lots of them and no clothes this year—as well as a marked-down pair of shoes and a black dress for herself for the South Pacific opening night. She ran into her student Troy’s mother outside the electronics store and avoided giving a specific answer about his behavior in class. Troy was a classic attention deficit disorder child, and although Elaine hated the thought of medicating children for anything nonfatal, she was going to approach his parents at the beginning of the spring semester with the school nurse’s recommendation that he go on Ritalin. The mother seized on the ambiguity of Elaine’s answer and interpreted it, with obvious relief, as news that her son had improved.
At the grocery store on the way home Elaine couldn’t find a single unbruised apple, and her credit card was declined twice at the checkout counter. A humpbacked, slightly retarded man in a green apron was called over to return to the store’s shelves the $73.19 worth of food and household cleaning items that Elaine couldn’t pay for. Outside, someone had keyed her car along the passenger side. Seeing the white sine wave running across the two doors and tail almost made her cry.
At home in the living room, Trevor was playing with a boy she’d never seen before while Abraham sat seven inches from the television screen. Her credit card bill had been due two weeks earlier. A check her father had promised to send was not in the day’s mail. A cursory glance at the kitchen cupboards decided their dinner: chicken soup and boxed mashed potatoes. Greg had not called.
“Mom?” said Trevor, padding into the kitchen with a plastic gun whose trigger had broken off. He wore a red cape that Elaine had made for him out of an old pillowcase. “Can Brian stay for dinner?”