by Josh Emmons
“Prentiss, hey!” said Alvin, sliding onto a stool next to him. He had that ridiculous hairstyle going, a sort of wavy pompadour that advertised homosexuality as blatantly as a rainbow decal arcing across your forehead. And some kind of overcrafted beard. More disturbingly, however, his face had swollen shiny bruises and his discolored nose slanted to the left. “These peanuts look tasty.” After a handful, “Mmm! And they are. Gobble gobble.” He grinned at Prentiss.
“Alvin, something happened to you.”
“Yes, I was attacked.”
“What was it, some kind of gang activity?”
“No, it was a psycho at CalCourts. I was minding my own business when he jumped me.”
“Your nose is broken.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. It’s only my face, though, right? He could have done something vicious like throw my towel in the shower.” He said this as a joke and it was funnier than Prentiss expected. Some people could lose their legs and start talking right away about the money they’d save not having to buy shoes. Alvin signaled for the bartender’s attention. “Two whiskeys and a couple of beer backs, please. For me and my friend.” He nodded in Prentiss’s direction.
“What the?” Prentiss said, straightening his back and looking over his shoulder. Every internal alarm he had sounded off in doomsday peals. Jesus Christ, a whiskey and a beer back! Might as well rape the first fine woman he saw and rob a couple banks while he was at it. Why not? If law and order were to be flushed down the toilet. A whiskey and a beer back, that was a cyanide tablet in your hand when they were coming to lynch you. “You got to understand me. I’m not going out like that.”
“All in good time. A wonderful thing has happened to me, and I want us to make some real progress tonight. I know how you must feel about Jamal relapsing. We all do. It’s like losing a dear friend to AIDS.”
This was turning out to be a disaster, this new sponsor deal with Alvin. Tomorrow Prentiss would ask the AA leaders to suggest someone else. Say that it was bad chemistry between him and Alvin and he wanted someone he could relate to and who else might they know looking to extend a helping hand. “I can’t say about the AIDS, but it’s true I’m not happy about Jamal. That didn’t need to come to pass. Still, the man could be innocent. There’s nobody said yet he was sipping.”
Alvin nodded. “True.” The drinks were placed before them and Alvin picked up his whiskey. “Prentiss? Will you join me?”
Prentiss, who as he looked at the drinks felt his mouth fill up with saliva, got off his stool, rubbed his lower lip, and said, “I’m serious. This is where I split. I’m not going to say anything to anybody about this, about the drinks, but nor am I going to fall off. I been sober five months, I’m doing it and I’m not going to quit.”
A sort of gay white man’s bemusement stole across Alvin’s face, what in another time and place, and without the bruises, would have been called debonair. “Hold on a minute, you determined man. I want you to pick up the whiskey and hold it in your hand and lift it up to toast with me. We’re not going to drink it, we’re just going to toast and then set it back down.”
Prentiss looked at him with consternation. “You out of your mind?”
“If you bear with me for a few minutes this will all make sense.”
“Listen, I’m admit it if that’s what you want to hear: I’m a weak man. I don’t have what it takes to be walking the tightrope if there’s no safety net underneath.”
Alvin stood up, placed the whiskey in Prentiss’s hand, and, holding Prentiss’s drink hand in his own free hand, clinked the two glasses together and raised them up to Prentiss’s and his lips. Prentiss’s heartbeat was so fast he thought it would run out of power and just stop. He was sick and stared at the whiskey poised three inches from his mouth, with all of its malts in a beautiful swirl, those currents of correction, and thought of how maybe jail would have been the better option after all, that yea though he walk through the valley of the shadow of death and neither hear nor see evil, he could feel it deep in the molten core of his self. The magic books were all checked out. White women afraid of you because you’re black, they’re the beauty and you’re the beast, and sure in the fairy tale they might see through their fear and recognize your humanity but in the real world no one had the time or inclination to see through shit. Our first impressions were all we cared to have. And there was damnation at his fingertips.
“To rejuvenation!” Alvin said. And then, in a diffusion of tension so great that later Prentiss could only think of those spy movies in which a ticking bomb, seconds away from detonating, is disconnected by a sweating-bullets hero, he lowered Prentiss’s hand as well as his own. Whiskeys returned to the table. Pain, pain, go away, and don’t come back another day. Alvin looked like they’d scaled Everest. Prentiss had a splitting headache. Alvin smiled from ear to ear and with the graciousness of a maitre d’ guided Prentiss onto his stool and returned to his own. “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind sometimes. I’m sorry. It’s what my sponsor did with me, and it’s what I believe works. You can’t say you’re building up your resistance to alcohol if you shut yourself up in meetings and never confront the problem. Oscar Wilde said he could resist everything but temptation. I’m here to make sure you can resist everything including temptation.”
Prentiss took a deep breath and said, still a little wobbly in his thoughts and with an ice pick in his brain, “I hear what you’re saying.”
“I know you do. It’s what I sensed from the beginning.”
For weeks the signs had been all over Eureka. On lampposts, in store windows, suspended banner high between stoplights on Fourth and Fifth Streets. “Come to ‘South Pacific,’ where true love waits on some enchanted evening!!!” The enchanted evenings in question began with the show’s debut on Friday, December 20, a date printed on the signs just above its location, the Muir Elementary Gymnasium. Gymnasium was spelled “Gimnasium” on all of the signs except for the Fifth Street banner, a mistake that made Elaine cringe and want to sail away to the real South Pacific, but that endeared Eurekans to the show. The mistake got people thinking I-haven’t-been-to-a-student-play-since-I-was-a-student-myself, and they kept the opening date in the backs of their minds, and then they found themselves buying tickets at the door. Elaine couldn’t believe the number of cars parked there on opening night when she peeked around the corner from the gym’s back door, which she then entered for a last-minute pep talk to the cast.
“You all did perfectly at yesterday’s rehearsal and you’re going to do it even better tonight!” she said.
One of the sailors asked how it could be done better than perfectly, and she smiled as though he weren’t being sarcastic. Many children had to pee. Elaine did, too, but she was nervous about leaving the remaining congregation of actors, so she held it in and snapped her fingers briskly and looked through the curtains and saw the seats filling up with parents as well as a number of unfamiliar faces. Some became recognizable upon prolonged inspection. Steve Baker was there, as was a twenty-ish girl named Eve who lived in the apartment building next to Elaine’s house, and various others. She closed the curtains and noticed that a million things were wrong with the set at the same time that a million things were right.
In the audience, Prentiss sat with his mother and searched her handbag for the arthritis ointment she swore was in there but, if it was, must have been invisible. His mother had a tendency to be short with him, and he really wasn’t in the mood for it presently, as he’d been lambasted at work by Mary Ellen for misfiling three science-fiction book series that had appeared to be one, all the books having nearly identical covers and titles. Bring on the damned enchantment, he thought, shaking his head at his grimacing mother. Behind him Lillith sat with her friend Tina because her younger sister Marie had a small role in the play, and this was a family obligation that she didn’t relish—a three-hour musical—but had to perform lest certain privileges be taken away from her, such as t
he Christmas vacation freedom she’d need to perform the spell at Moonstone Beach in a few days. She and Tina chewed spicy cinnamon gum. Not far from them Sadie shook a bag of popcorn she’d bought from the concession stand in the gym’s foyer, bringing to prominence the largest popped kernels. She ate the salty snack and grew thirsty and felt conspicuous being alone, imagining that everyone around her considered attending a Rodgers and Hammerstein production by oneself unspeakably pathetic. But she was an adult, so she put on a face like I’m-fine. It was almost defiant but not quite. In fact, she so successfully looked fine and almost defiant that Silas, sitting a row and seven columns over, stared at her for a few minutes before concluding that she was something of a Mona Lisa, one of those women whose secrets buoy her over the turbulent waters of every day. Silas crossed and recrossed his legs, unable to stand the accumulating pain in his knees for more than thirty seconds before repositioning them. He was with his albino friend, who pointed out that the music being played quietly over the gym’s loudspeakers as they waited was “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City,” from the Oklahoma! soundtrack. The albino said, “Kansas City until recently was the greatest cow town our country has ever known.” Silas agreed. He’d driven through it in 1963 with his first wife and been impressed by the livestock smell extending out twenty miles from the city limits. The young man sitting behind him was Barry, there because his boyfriend, Alvin, loved musicals. Loved them. “Musicals are God’s gift to cock lovers everywhere,” Alvin said, which Barry thought was a crude formulation. Besides which, musicals were stupid. He preferred a good Chekhov play. Something contemplative. Something that questioned our roles in the world. Alvin stealthily held Barry’s hand and Barry hoped no one noticed not because he was afraid of being outed, but because he didn’t want other queer men there to know he was taken. He didn’t like feeling so annoyed and told himself to relax; it was okay; he’d made his choice. But it was like his body was crawling with lice and he’d never been so uncomfortable, so that Steve, slouching into a seat by the fire exit, was grateful to notice someone in the audience apparently suffering as much as he was. Steve had come to the performance because he’d spent the afternoon at his office gripping the phone, not calling his soon-to-be ex-wife Anne. He’d canceled patient after patient and thought seriously that he was going out of his mind, and so decided at seven p.m., when the office staff had cleared out and the building hummed with sleeping computers and medical equipment, that he would distract himself by going to the student production of South Pacific he’d seen advertised on a billboard recently. Three seats down from him Eve was biting the last bitable shred of fingernail she had left, feeling the frigidity of the empty seat next to her as though it were a wind tunnel, for Ryan was supposed to have been sitting in it. Which made her mad, because it was he who worked at Muir, and he who’d told his new friend Principal Giaccone that he would come to the show, because when two men possess incriminating evidence against each other, they are prone to act like the best of friends and go out of their way to express interest in the other’s well being and so in this way persuade their girlfriends to do things like come to see an elementary school musical as an act of shrewd politicking. Eve stared at the smudges of blood at the tips of her left ring and right pointer fingers until the lights went down, at which point Joon-sup, sitting nearby, woke up. He was sober and this play was going to be a deeply normalizing experience for him. Surrounded by the burghers of Eureka society and entirely drug-free, he was going to sink into a classic of American pop culture he’d never seen but knew to be absolutely without weirdness or psychotropic undertones. A Leon-free environment. For added comfort, he would have liked to hold the hand of the old lady sitting next to him, but he knew this to be impossible and so refrained.
The Oklahoma! soundtrack was abruptly cut off.
A kind of prerecorded quality crackled in the air then, with a hundred and thirty people shifting in their chairs at once in blackened synchronicity, and throats were cleared and keys fell out of pockets to land, in metallic accident, on the floor, with arms stretched down at once to swoop them up, to restore a silence that had never been.
“Hello and welcome!” Elaine said when a burst of light found her onstage, standing before closed curtains and holding a clip-on microphone. “We’re pleased that so many of you could make it tonight for what I know you will enjoy tremendously.” She was nervous and began to feel a touch of displacement, as though she didn’t know precisely where she was or what she was supposed to say. This is only a brief introduction. This is only a brief introduction, and everyone is naked. “We had a little trouble with the printer today, and that’s why our program guides aren’t quite ready for you, which means I should just say that South Pacific takes place in 1944, in the South Pacific—but that’s obvious I guess,” her breath began to back up in her throat and she couldn’t exhale, “and it centers on the American military,” so that she needed air desperately and didn’t know what to say and her nervousness was erupting into a full-blown panic attack, “and so here it is!” She hurried offstage and there were thirty seconds of silence as the sound engineer, a sixth-grader with goggle-sized glasses who’d expected her introduction to take much longer, scrambled to attention and pressed all the right buttons. Elaine leaned against the fold-up stadium-style aluminum benches in the dark and slowly came back in control of her breathing.
The girl in charge of cueing actors’ lines asked if she was all right. “Fine, thanks,” Elaine said, and didn’t know when someone had last asked her that question. Couldn’t place her most recent brush with compassion. She smiled and followed the cue girl back to the wings to watch the show.
For a while everything went well—the kids’ voices were strong and their blocking correct—but then Elaine saw in profile what everyone in the audience saw head-on. Midway through “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” as little boys in sailor suits marched around one another and an agile child did a back flip, a ceiling light crashed down onto a pile of sand. It made a thunderous whump. No one was injured, and enough cries went up both from the actors and the audience that when a second light dropped from the ceiling rafters, the space below it was clear. People made an orderly stampede for the exits. Only a single light remained in its perch, and those who stopped to look up saw what appeared to be a human figure shimmying along the rafters. Its face was hidden in shadows, though some of those present thought they knew who it was.
Elaine was relieved that none of the children were hurt and, when the regular lights were turned on and she appraised the damage, was grateful and amazed to see the show lights basically intact. The sand had cushioned their fall so that they wouldn’t need to be replaced. There was by this time no trace of a man or woman crawling along the ceiling rafters, and Elaine, not having seen him or her, was as perplexed as the children about what could have dislodged the lights. Chalking it up to a mysterious disaster that could have been far worse, they cleaned up and went home and the next day put on a trouble-free show, honoring all tickets from the night before, glad to see most everyone return for the enchantment that was delivered as promised.
6
December 24
7:23 a.m.
The milk was bad. Lillith regarded the Cheerios floating among tiny coagulated curds in her bowl. She felt a gagging reflex and didn’t have to get ready for work. Tonight was the spell with Tina and Franklin and she felt such affirmation that they trusted her and she’d be the mistress of ceremony. Inside of her was a zygote and she thought about the potential baby that she was going to have removed. Choose life. Papa don’t preach. Unwed teenage mother. Me and you against the world. Feeding time. A cry in the dark. Teething. It was one thing to be biologically able to have children and quite another to be psychologically ready. Women die in childbirth. More die of heartbreak. And it was clear that having a child now would in no way liberate her, which was the argument some girls made about how it was your baby and you made the decisions on how to raise it and what an entrée int
o the adult world with its tax credits and school vouchers and what’re your thoughts on breast-feeding versus formula—that it would be the ultimate form of bondage for a girl who was mature and blessed with common sense and involved in a spiritual crusade bigger than herself. Bigger than everyone. She poured her cereal down the drain and a few o’s got stuck in the scratched sink basin. She saw a game of tic-tac-toe and thought it unwinnable.
7:55 a.m.
Silas in a black turtleneck walked along I Street, drinking from a discreet thermos the espresso blend he’d brewed at home, his hair like so many pins in a cushion. Mornings were the best time to see and understand Eureka. When the Laotian women trudged home from the Asian market and the shopkeepers crisscrossed the paths of graveyard shifters and the children began to play, immune from the working world’s difficulties, more than occupied by difficulties of their own. He’d been conscious of his knees since beginning his walk a half hour earlier, and although this consciousness usually segued into sharp pain after a few minutes, right then they felt fine, like the joints of a man who’d never groaned going downhill. He raised a fist in the air to celebrate them. He could see to where the street ended seven blocks away at a rotting wharf on the bay. Thirty years ago, when the city’s fortunes were brighter and that part of town had had hotels and seafood restaurants and penny arcades, he’d spent Saturday afternoons talking with county developers about increasing Eureka’s population without turning it into a factory town. Thirty years ago it had seemed possible to make Eureka a desirable place to be.