by Josh Emmons
What had happened in the interim—the failure of any industry to take root after logging and salmon fishing began their steady decline—was no longer as depressing to Silas as it once had been. Communities, like empires and life and perhaps time itself, began and ended over and over. The city of Troy in Asia Minor had been built and destroyed on ten occasions and enjoyed fame only for its seventh incarnation, Troy VIIa; the other nine Troys were unknown because they lacked a defining tragedy. They hadn’t burned to the ground. Their demise was of the prosaic, Eureka variety, a slow fade to black. Silas the Reincarnable was three years shy of seventy-eight, when the average American male died, and he hadn’t drawn up a will or bought a burial plot—as if anyone without a morbid attachment to their corpse would do such a thing! That man at Folie à Deux was an imbecile! Death might be the beginning of the beginning, and the here and now merely a preamble. And after Eureka would come another Eureka that perhaps would be called something else, and would precipitate still other Eurekas or non-Eurekas. Silas looked at the latticed veins and spreading skin cancers on his hands. He experienced pain-free knees. Beside him waiting for the stoplight to turn green at I and Seventh Streets was a young boy with a Times-Standard satchel over his shoulder. His hands were white and undefined, and he said, wearing a stiff baseball cap, “Paper?” Silas looked at him for a moment and then counted the bills in his wallet: “I’ve only got ten dollars.” The boy considered this and said, “It costs forty cents.” Silas handed him all his money: “I want you to spend this on someone you care about. Doesn’t matter what you get, so long as it comes from you.” Then he accepted and uncreased his copy of the Times-Standard and crossed the street while searching for the birth announcements page. There were seven.
8:01 a.m.
Shane stared at Lenora’s ass. Usually he didn’t think twice about it. It was always there, there it always was, and what he wouldn’t give to have a little variety and this was another of the great Mormon traditions, polygamy, and why wasn’t he in one of the millions of small Utah towns that condoned it? His cock was on standby. He could lube it up in the bathroom and take care of himself, but why be married if you have to resort to that? Lenora’s ass was within his jurisdiction. He had proprietary rights. He put his hand on it and she swatted him away. He rubbed his dick against it and when she began to swat it she felt what it was and made a low groan and put her head under the pillow. Shane peeled back her underwear slowly so that the crack of her ass was visible, then more visible, then in one swift motion he pulled her panties all the way down. Lenora’s head jerked out from under the pillow, “Stop it. What time it is? I had an awful night’s sleep.” But Shane’s pajama bottoms were already bunched at his knees as he forcefully lifted her ass in the air, rubbed saliva onto his cock, and directed it into her with tight, economical thrusts. Lenora tried to scoot away but was stopped by Shane’s firm two-handed grip on her waist. “Stop it!” Lenora shouted, “Stop it right now!” Shane closed his eyes and sped up his rhythm. Lenora cried, “You’re hurting me!” Shane flinched and mumbled “yeah” with gathered energy and face-scowl, as though he were rowing crew and the finish line was just ahead, and then with a loud “ahhh!” he came and thumped his left foot on the bed and then pulled out of his wife, who was silent and glazed over, stunned staring at the bedpost in front of her.
8:02 a.m.
Prentiss stood in the shower soaping up his underarms and elbows and thinking that for all the bad he could say about the library—and this was a lot of bad—he appreciated its time-off schedule. Every other week, it seemed, there was a holiday for this president or that murdered humanitarian. It was as nice as working at the post office. Prentiss felt so good and proud of not having drunk anything in five months. Like he’d made it up the steepest mountain, like he really was the Little Engine That Could. His longest dry spell ever. He had, maybe, let’s just consider the possibility for a minute, overcome his addiction, and to celebrate maybe that night if someone offered him a beer he would accept it like it was no big thing, and there’d be no awkward explaining to this girl Justine about him being an addict, and who was to say that the once-an-addict-always-an-addict line you got from AA was true for everybody? Look at how he’d resisted that whiskey with a beer back that Alvin had shoved in his hand. And the resolve with which he now walked past the liquor aisle in the supermarket and didn’t look at more than his reflection in the windows of the bars he passed going to and from work. These were the characteristics of a man in control. He felt real good. It was possible that he was cured. No it’s not no it’s not no it’s not you’re sick forever. Sick sick sick. One sip of beer and you’ll wake up in the hospital, recovery aborted. Jail time. No Justine. No job. Just justice. “It ain’t necessarily like that,” Prentiss said to the showerhead. Yes it is, it hissed back.
8:37 a.m.
Sadie lifted the band of her underwear and saw the skin beneath it flush from white to pink. She’d have to wear her slimming pants to the night’s dinner with Roger Nuñez and her sister and Greg. Her sister, probably with the aid of a hospital’s worth of amphetamines, had kept her high school figure, or at least her junior college figure, and was five years younger to boot, which would invite comparison between her and Sadie’s bodies at the restaurant, which was so unfair. Sadie had once had a very nice body. In tight jeans and an undersized T-shirt she’d made everyone wince, girls from envy and guys from desire. Did our past glories count for nothing? (Nothing.)
8:51 a.m.
Steve and Greg stood over an elderly lady’s open upper thigh. She’d fallen the night before while reaching for a dish towel and sustained an acute fracture to her left femur bone. The surgery was routine and without complication. The assisting nurse was unusually quiet. Greg had told Steve in the changing room earlier that he’d invented some new sexual positions with the assisting nurse recently, porn-grade stuff, and that he had to be careful which hospital corridors he walked down with her, because Marlene’s job now sent her all over the third and fourth floors. Steve had called his future ex-wife Anne before going in to surgery to ask what she was doing, to see if that night he might drive down to Willits and take her to dinner or a movie, and a man had answered the phone at her apartment. “What do you expect, Steve?” Anne said when she took the phone. “You thought you’d drive two hours to go to dinner? You and I aren’t even on speaking terms.” What kind of thing was that to say? Well, it was weary and unsympathetic, for starters. It was zero patience and unromantic and unnostalgic. It dismissed out of hand the possibility of their friendship, much less their reconciliation, and he should have expected it. Steve mechanically washed his hands when the surgery was done and Greg asked what he had planned for that night. “Nothing,” he said. Greg rubbed his head and his face and all the itches he’d had to suppress during surgery, and said, “It’s Christmas Eve. Meet up with us for drinks. I’m going to dinner with Marlene and her sister and some guy, but afterward we’re going to the Jambalaya. Around ten. You should come. I’m worried about you, buddy.” Steve forced a smile and said, “I’m all right. But maybe. Maybe I’ll come.”
9:08 a.m.
Elaine’s father in Red Bluff wasn’t answering his phone and he didn’t have an answering machine. Said it took away the spontaneity. He liked sitting around with a good action movie on the tube and hearing the phone ring and having no idea who it might be. There was so much suspense when he answered. Elaine made her kids French toast and afterward they, superamped on sugar, fled the scene of sticky table and half-empty glasses of milk and a misshapen butter stick to jump on their bicycles and speed away for adventure’s sake, the younger trailing after the elder, their shouts dying in the fullness of morning. She listened to a message left on her machine by Principal Giaccone the day before, a rambling apology for his collaboration with the private investigator that Greg had hired—he’d told the detective about his and Elaine’s afternoon tryst, and Elaine had received a note from Greg saying that if she thought she’d lay the infide
lity charge on him with impunity, she was sorely mistaken, because he had ammunition—and the hope that they might see each other later in the week. A possum had strewn her garbage all over the front lawn. There was no more spray cleaner for the table. No more a smart little girl with no heart, I have found me a wonderful guy. I am in a conventional dither, with a conventional star in my eye. South Pacific was on permaloop in her mind.
10 a.m.
“Lill?” Lillith’s mother came into the living room with the top of her blouse unbuttoned. Her foundation and blush were applied thickly, giving her a marionette effect. “What are you doing watching TV? We have to leave in ten minutes and you’re not dressed.”
“I’m not going.”
“Let’s not have this conversation. We know it by heart.”
“But you don’t listen because I told you that I’m a nonbeliever. A nonbeliever, Mom. I don’t think Jesus died for our sins and I don’t think he walked on water and I don’t think God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush and I don’t think Abraham lived to be a hundred and seventy-five years old and I don’t think it rained for forty days and forty nights and I don’t—”
“Lightning’s going to strike any minute and I can’t afford the repairs. So I’d appreciate it if you’d get dressed. We now have eight minutes.”
Lillith went to her room and put on slacks and a rib-knit pullover and boots. She checked her email and had been spammed by eight adult sites offering her good money if she’d agree to go to some chat rooms and talk explicitly about her sexual fantasies of older married men. How gross! And her email server was so slow in deleting all of it even though its spam-blocking feature was supposedly so sophisticated.
“Honey?” her mother tapped on her door. “Could you please help the twins? Two minutes.”
“I’m busy.”
“So am I. Please do this for me and I’ll take us to lunch at the Red Lion after church.”
“Yippee.”
In the hallway her youngest siblings, fraternal twins Mordecai and Bethany, were spit-shined in untied shoes. Lillith sang the laces song to them while demonstrating again how a pretty bow was made as their other sister Marie stomped by on the rag and was such a bitch. Oh, Jesus. Ella es la puta del diablo, the whore of satan. Lillith’s baby could end up like Marie; they shared genes. Someone pass the coat hanger. She took the twins’ hands and led them through the open front door and into the back of the car. There she waited in the quiet that overcame the twins whenever they donned their church clothes, a Pavlovian silence. She was skinnier than Sam’s last girlfriend and Sam would never like her. Her mother suspected her of lying and stealing and occultism. Her father called her Pooh-Bear and bought her inappropriate underwear. Her McDonald’s manager, Ron, stood next to her for five minutes at a time even after she’d been fully trained at the register, and he made a production every day of counting out her cash tray with her cent by cent. Teenage girls felt powerless. Lillith was a Wiccan. Girls aged twelve to nineteen went through tumultuous physical and emotional changes, and experienced for the first time sex and drugs and familial estrangement, and inherited a set of women’s values some of which were deeply self-destructive. Lillith that evening was going to preside over a spell to save a man’s life. The rate of depression among girls her age was twice that of boys. Cast the corners and light the joss sticks and time her incantation to the low tide, with Tina and Frederick acting as her auxiliary magi. Anorexia was about control over one’s body more than being beautiful in the way that rape was about power more than sex. She was going to plunge her ensorcelled hands through the Astral Wall, grab Leon Meed, and bring him home. Emotional violence among girls equaled physical violence among boys, and Lillith would climb up the rope ladder she’d spent so much time weaving, look around at the new world, and embrace it.
10:11 a.m.
If anything it reminded Joon-sup of when he first came to the U.S. and misinterpreted conversations. He’d think people were talking about prenuptial agreements when really they’d be discussing cross-country skiing, and he’d make the apology with crimson face and go numb with embarrassment at having said something about the caution that defines weak love. His was a feeling of I-don’t-have-a-toe-hold. And yet he’d thought clearly then and he could think clearly now. He could get to where he needed to go and feed and clothe himself. In many ways he was still okay; he was fine. Fundamentally, however, he was not okay or fine. He was out of sync, misaligned with reality, and he shouldn’t postpone seeking a remedy.
Driving to the Better Bagel he didn’t call himself crazy because that was too broad a term and included mass murderers and people who thought they were Caesar Augustus. He knew he was Joon-sup, of Pusan, South Korea, and he preferred thinking of himself as “touched.” There were no voices in his head. He was not violent. He understood the value of stoplights and birthday cards and having a good credit rating. He was just a little off. But the sad part about being just a little off—of being touched and not crazy—was his constant mindfulness of this offness, his appreciation of how much help he needed. Joon-sup had to check himself into an asylum. He had to insist that they lock him up and not release him until he was sure never, ever to see Leon Meed again. He had to demand that they keep him under surveillance and in regimented therapy, and he’d not open his own restaurant or meet a girl he liked or play a part in local environmentalism. He would be gone a long time and return with mental scars, a veteran of his internal civil war.
Sitting in the Better Bagel when Joon-sup arrived was Barry, spreading hummus over an onion bagel and tearing open a paper packet of salt. Blood pressure be damned. Barry had changed quickly in the last couple of weeks. He was twenty-four and had thought everything settled, having lived by himself for years, slightly shy, a sexual teetotaler, convinced that Eros held nothing in store for him. Long nights of refusing to acknowledge the emergency in his lap. Whereas now he was a SWAT team attending to the emergency all the time. With and without Alvin. It was as if he had to make up for all his past neglect of sex by fixating on it with Olympic intensity. Everywhere he looked was a doable guy, a possible tango, and it was so exciting. Unreasonable, yes, but exciting and such a relief, like he’d been the sickly boy kept indoors all the time who was now cured and got to play outside, this great new lease on life that had previously seemed unattainable.
Barry bought a bagel to go and lingeringly placed money in Joon-sup’s hand. He sighed oh well when Joon-sup didn’t respond in kind, and left.
10:17 a.m.
Eve sat in Skeletor’s house with Skeletor’s mom and Aaron and the Odd Wala, watching a televangelist’s hair. They all were. They were transfixed by this hair that shone like a wet otter on the head of the thick-necked preacher grafting God’s word onto the everyday problems facing Americans. A man making scripture relevant to people. He was talking about how Joshua’s six-day march around the walls of Jericho, with his seven priests carrying the ark aloft, may appear to us an inadequate method of overcoming our enemies, of conquering their resistance, but that against faith in God Jericho’s forty-foot-high walls were like bedsheets in a windstorm. Faith was harder than titanium, faster than light, more mercurial than water. Armed with faith you were equal to any challenge.
“I’ll bet he uses brilliantine,” said the Odd Wala, a downy-headed twenty-year-old with enormous baseball-mitt-sized hands, a guy who looked both ten years younger and older than he was, like one of those broad-forehead kids who seem simultaneously middle-aged and preadolescent, “and beeswax.”
Aaron riffled through Skeletor’s music collection and said, “Mousse and blow dry, then hair-spray.”
Eve thought that a faith harder than titanium might hurt to land on if you were falling, but she liked the idea of it also being mercurial, able to flow over and around any obstacle. A marijuana cigarette was handed to her that she passed along without smoking. This was a big contradiction, this hardness and mercurialness. Maybe faith changed in different situations, a protean energy adapta
ble to your needs. When you required strength it was titanium, for speed it was light, and for flexibility it was water. It endowed you with every conceivable survival skill.
“Do you think he’s had his chin worked on?” asked Aaron.
“Look at that cleft,” said the Odd Wala. “It’s a golf tee.”
“Marcus!” cried Skeletor’s mom. “What are you doing in there?”
From his bathroom Skeletor yelled, “Nothing!”
Eve’s parents were Christians, but of a purely circumstantial variety given that they were brought up in America; they no more questioned their faith than they did their support for the local football team. They never mentioned it when she talked to them on the phone.
10:21 a.m.
Elaine’s father sounded hoarse on the phone, like he’d been ringside all night, shouting for his contender to quit losing. But it was nothing. A little winter cold that she shouldn’t worry about.
“Do you have plans for your birthday?” she asked.
“I’m going to fix my shortwave that broke a couple weeks ago, when I was listening to—” He got quiet.
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“I miss you and so do the boys. They’re always asking when we can come visit.”
“That’d be fine.”
“Are you doing better at concentrating? Have you been practicing on the crossword puzzles and brain teasers, the focus exercises your doctor recommended?”
“Could do that.”