by Josh Emmons
“I should tell you that Greg and I are splitting up. It’s a long, complicated story, but that’s the gist of it, and now there will be more room in the house for you if you decide to come live with us.”
“I don’t know when that is.”
“What I’m saying is that I want to repeat my offer for you to live with us. Greg has moved out.”
“Where has he gone?”
“To a friend’s house. The point is that you could move in.”
“I see.”
“Are you feeling the head clouds again?” The head clouds were how Elaine’s father described the confusion that overtook him sometimes, the fog obscuring his thoughts.
“The what?”
“Dad, it sounds like you’re not following me. I’ll call you later. I just want to wish you happy birthday.”
“That’s nice. Thank you.”
“I love you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m going to come visit in the next few days. I’m on Christmas vacation.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up and began washing dishes.
10:30 a.m.
Eve walked along Tenth Street and passed the Congregationalist church with its small assembled-letter sign listing the day’s service times and pastor and topic. Eve had nowhere particular to be that morning, except maybe “around,” whatever that meant, when Ryan woke up, and she thought it might be interesting to sit in on a religious service for once in her life. As a look at how the other half lived. As an experiment. She climbed the steps and entered a crowded reception lobby and stared across to two sets of open French doors that led into the worship hall. There was organ music and the scent of an electric radiator underlying seventy brands of floral perfume and aftershave cologne. Eve was the only person wearing black lipstick. Families and the individually faithful talked and read the program and generated a quiet hum of high-stakes gossip. Someone’s brother had prostate cancer. Someone’s daughter had broken off her engagement. Someone’s nephew had joined the ministry. Eve turned to leave with the sinking and petty thought that the people of God were dull and tried too hard to smell like flowers.
12:24 p.m.
“It was rape,” Lenora said.
Shane glanced at the odometer. “We’re married.”
“I didn’t marry you. I don’t know who I married, but it wasn’t you. To go and beat up someone you don’t know at CalCourts and be drunk. When you made a vow! You made a vow, Shane! You’d had this crazy childhood but when we met you said you’d reformed. I mean, and you did and it wasn’t a lie until— You’ve been completely normal until— And then this morning I can’t even tell you what I felt like when you raped me. Like a whore. Like—”
“We’re not going to have this talk. We’ve had this talk.” Shane smoothed a crease in his trousers and signaled left at Emery Lane. A logging truck roared past them trailing diesel exhaust. They were going home to change and then meet friends at the Pantry for lunch.
“We have not had this talk. This is the first time for this talk. The CalCourts thing—”
“There’s nothing more to say about CalCourts except that that guy pissed me off and he deserved it. He was beating off in the hot tub and I should have put him in the hospital.”
“What kind of talk is this? You sound like a TV character with the put-him-in-the-hospital. He did go to the hospital, but anyway that’s only one episode. This morning what you did was unacceptable. Just because we’re married doesn’t give you the right to—”
“It gives me the right to do what husbands do. I swear sometimes you must be listening to the feminazis with all this about marriage isn’t a holy union and you have these individual rights. What do individual rights have to do with us? We are going to be together for an eternity. Even after we die. You know this. This is scripture.”
“Drinking alcohol and beating up someone you don’t know and raping your wife is not scripture.”
“Say it one more time. Say ‘rape’ one more time and there’s going to be consequences.” He waved at a neighbor walking her poodle. “It’s like you don’t want the marriage to work anymore so you’re putting this crazy spin on everything.”
“Tell me how you justify beating up that guy and drinking alcohol. The Book of Mormon forbids those things. These are the most basic tenets of our church.”
“Do you drink Diet Coke?”
“I can’t believe you’d compare that to what you did.”
“Do you? Tell me, is having caffeine not a violation of church doctrine?”
They were in the driveway and a light rain fell and the windshield wipers noisily and smearily cleared away the water. Their bull terrier, a three-year-old named Cassie, pressed her nose through the wire mesh of her kennel and howled.
“It is,” said Lenora. “It’s a violation and I admit it but there’s a sizable difference between that sin and beating up—”
“So you admit it and I admit that in some respects I shouldn’t have got in that fight, except that he was a dirty faggot which is worse than anything I did. He was jacking off in the hot tub, and that means he was the one sinning against God and I was just an agent of his punishment.”
Lenora shook her head and watched Cassie pace back and forth. “Are you calling yourself an agent of God?”
“I’m just saying. There’s maybe more than meets the eye here, but you’d never consider that because suddenly you’re defending every faggot and women’s lib fanatic out there. How can I communicate with you when you’ve gone off the deep end? I don’t even know you when you’re like this.”
“I don’t know you, period.” She got out of the car and walked briskly inside, not waiting for Shane to come up behind her before slamming the door and going to her room to cry, lunch abandoned.
1:38 p.m.
Eve placed her hand on Ryan’s forehead. He was cold. You heard about how quickly body heat dissipated after death, that within two hours the body’s blood seemed always to have run cold, but you weren’t prepared for the actual feel of it. Like skin-textured silicone, lifeless and pliant and cool. Their apartment was a cold December, and perhaps he’d been dead a long time already. His eyes were almost closed and he wore a ripped cartoon T-shirt; his blue hair lay stagnant around his neck.
Eve sat down on the British flag they used as a throw rug and stared dumbly at the body. Nausea welled up in her stomach and she vomited into a flowerpot that once had held a house fern but now was full of pennies and garbage bag twisties. The stereo speakers emitted a low-fi buzz from the amplifier that was left on and an open CD case implied that the last thing he’d heard was the hopped-up world beat of Anglo-Zimbabweans.
A fly landed on Eve’s knee and she thought of how ironic it was for the fly to mistake her body for the corpse. He is dead. She began to scream, to wail, to give egress to a force of absolute terror and loss and disbelief. She was momentarily insane and she screamed and her ears rang. It was such a force, a juggernaut charging through the space between her and Ryan and the place to which Ryan had gone, if he’d gone anywhere. Nevermore.
She screamed and screamed and screamed and then shut her mouth and got to her feet, but her ankles were made of putty and she crumpled to the floor, where she lay hugging the ground and knew not to move.
Which was how Elaine found her ten minutes later when, responding to the noise that reached her outside, she let herself into the apartment. At first Elaine thought that both prone bodies were dead, but then she saw that at least the girl was breathing. The boy, he looked familiar and yes upon closer inspection he was the janitor at Muir. She’d passed him in the halls a hundred times and had remarked on his hair, how much she liked it, and he’d smiled and said he liked her hair, which was plainly a joke but a good-natured one. The boy was dead. She remembered how, leaving Principal Giaccone’s office on That Day, she’d worried that he knew what had happened and would think less of her. That they wouldn’t be able to imagine the best about each other anymore.
“
I’m Elaine Perry,” she said, stepping away from the body and looking down at Eve. “I live in the house next door.”
“He’s dead.” Eve gazed hypnotized at her unlaced tennis shoe.
“Did you just find him?”
“Mmm.”
“Have you called the police?”
“No.”
Elaine located a cord coming out of the wall jack and followed it to a clear plastic phone buried under socks and underwear. She called the emergency number and then sat down on the floor next to Eve.
“I think you need to get up and explain how this happened, because the police will be here soon.”
Eve didn’t stir but was intent on that shoe. “He did smack.”
“It was a drug overdose?”
“And so say all of us,” Eve sang quietly, brokenly, mesmerically, “and so say all of us.”
“I heard you screaming.”
“That nobody can deny, that nobody can deny. For he’s a jolly good fe-he-llo, that nobody can deny.”
Elaine pushed a strand of hair behind her left ear and hugged her knees to her chest. She’d never seen someone in shock before. She reached out to stroke the girl’s back and Eve shot up straight and her face was excited and long and alabaster white.
“I was fifteen,” Eve said. “Ryan he was seventeen but he was in my math class in high school because he never studied and I did so I’d give him my homework to copy. We’d meet on the Row and he’d scribble it down with his beautiful hands; I’d sit across from him on a bench and supposedly study but really I’d watch the muscles of his hands working, they were so graceful. Sometimes he’d frown and you could tell he was trying to understand the math, and I’d point out when he miscopied a number and he’d look up at me and say, ‘I’m trying to make it look like trial and error.’ Then he’d press the eraser side of his pencil into my knee and wink and one time I felt this explosion travel from my knee to my head and it was love. I don’t know where it came from, like when you shiver and suddenly realize you’ve been cold a long time. We weren’t going out and he’d never said anything, but he was so beautiful and we had this daily ritual and it had become overpowering. I mean Juliet couldn’t touch the hem of what I felt. So that I wanted to dissolve into him, on the bench on the Row in front of God and everybody, just collapse into this love. To disappear. After a while I couldn’t keep it in any longer, but I couldn’t say anything outright, so one day I wrote on my homework in the middle of the math problems I have something to tell you but you have to guess. I gave the homework to him in the morning and he started to copy and I sat there pretending to read for English. After every word that might as well have been Latin I had such an impossible time understanding them, I’d look up and see where he was in the copying, as he worked his way toward what I’d written, and he had short hair then and it spiked out and I looked at it and couldn’t think what to do if he started laughing or got mad when he read my note. I tried to prepare myself for whatever happened. Then he was on the problem right before the note and I closed my book I couldn’t even pretend to read. Then he was copying the note and I waited almost hyperventilating for him to look at me, but instead he just moved right on to the next problem, and I figured that he must have been thinking about something else, otherwise how could he not have acknowledged it? Then it occurred to me that every morning his mind was probably a million miles away from me. All I thought about was him, but he was thinking of food or getting high or his skateboard or whatever. I sat there thinking that Ryan only smiled at me and poked my knee with his pencil because I let him copy my homework. It was so obvious and I’d been a fool. I mean, what did I think? That he could have done the work on his own but was copying mine as an excuse to be with me? I was so upset that I started crying and that was even worse, oh God that was horrible because I couldn’t control it. And Ryan didn’t notice, he just kept copying away, and I’d never felt so alone and humiliated and awful. I tried to be quiet but my chest made these little moans. Then he was done and he looked up and I hated him then, I hated his eyes and upturned nose and spiky hair and girly lips and he ignored that I was a wreck, that my face was red and I couldn’t breathe. Then he said, all blasé, ‘Could you check this over for me? I got a C on my last assignment because you didn’t catch a few mistakes I made.’ I was so mad and hurt I couldn’t say anything, so I took his paper and looked at it but couldn’t read it, my eyes were flooded with tears. Then I gave it back. ‘Looks fine,’ I said. He was like, ‘I don’t think so. I see something right here that I need your help on.’ And he gave it to me again and pointed to my note that he’d copied on his paper, so I read it as well as I could and it wasn’t the same thing I’d written. It said, I have one guess and one thing to tell you. My guess is that you want me to quit being so stupid and ask you out. My thing to tell you is that I was about to do it anyway. Us math idiots have a hard time making the first move. I must have read it a hundred times before I looked at him, and he was anxious, like he was the one who wasn’t sure how I’d respond. We sat for a minute like that and I had a headache from all my crying and my nose was congested. Then it was like I’d woken up from a nightmare and the world was so clear. Every crack in the school walls, every warped piece of wood in the benches, every beautiful shade of brown in Ryan’s eyes. I handed back the paper and my mouth was frozen in this huge grin, I just couldn’t stop smiling, it was like trying to keep your hair down in the wind, and he put his hand on mine and leaned forward and we kissed. People applauded and catcalled and I was in another world where things work out in the end.”
3:30 p.m.
Sadie wore a diamond broach and lavender silk blouse because she wouldn’t have time to go home and change before meeting her sister, Roger, and Greg for dinner. She was volunteering at the Free Clinic until six thirty. She held a diet cola in one hand and wrote a patient evaluation with the other. The two-week period beginning December 20 and ending January 3 was the busiest at the clinic, when it worked in closer tandem with the Suicide Prevention Hotline and treated a swollen number of walk-ins, and when it relied on trained counselors and therapists like Sadie to absorb the spillover from the permanent staff’s caseload. Sadie sat in an examination room by herself and pretended to turn down the volume of the piped-in “O Tannenbaum,” which was playing for possibly the fourth time that afternoon. She heard a knock at the door and a receptionist opened it to usher in a young Korean man.
“Dr. Jorgenson, this is June Soup Kim,” said the receptionist, who smiled at Joon-sup and at Sadie and then retreated, closing the door behind her.
“Hi,” said Sadie. “Please, have a seat.” She patted the armrest of a foam-cushioned chair and put aside the evaluation and kept her cola. She noticed a small tear in the sleeve of her new blouse that hadn’t yet given her the months of confidence she’d anticipated when buying it. Beauty was so fragile. “We could start by talking about why you’re here, if you feel comfortable with that.”
Joon-sup nodded and folded his hands on his lap. “I need you to write a recommendation to put me into a mental hospital.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m schizophrenic.”
“Have you been diagnosed by a professional?”
“No.”
“What makes you think you’re schizophrenic?”
“I’ve read the literature. I have both the positive and negative symptoms.”
“I see. Could you explain what those are?”
“My positive symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. My negative symptoms include blunted affect, apathy, and social withdrawal. I’m very far gone.”
Sadie finished her cola and placed it on a table behind her chair. The tear was in the shape of an L. “You’ve had hallucinations?”
“Yes.” Joon-sup sat rigidly still with an intense yet immobile expression, as though awaiting the results of an election in which he was running. He cleared his throat. “I require hospitalization and antipsychotics. I’m aware that I’ll be giving up my
right to move about freely. And I’m aware that I won’t be released unless a board of doctors thinks I can make it on my own with the help of the antipsychotics.”
“You’re prepared to give up a lot.”
“I want to get better.”
“That’s good. Did you make the decision to seek help on your own, or have your friends or family been involved?”
“On my own.”
“Do you have SSI?”
“What’s that?”
“Social Security Insurance. It covers most treatment expenses and provides some compensation for missed work. I only ask because hospitalization is expensive, and you may want to think about how to pay for it if it comes to that.”
“I have health insurance.”
“I should tell you right off that schizophrenia is hard to diagnose accurately. It’s often confused with manic depression. How long have you experienced its symptoms?”
“Two weeks.”
“That’s not very long.”
“It’s felt long to me.”
“Could you describe your symptoms in detail?”
“The main one is that I’m seeing someone who doesn’t exist. I mean, he exists, but he doesn’t exist in the places I see him.”
“Could you explain that a little more?”
Joon-sup leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, hands still folded, and said, “I see a man named Leon Meed appear and disappear. Really, though, I’m seeing the product of my imagination. An example is when I was driving in Eureka recently and he appeared in front of my van too close for me to not hit him, and then he disappeared. I was just going along and suddenly there he was and there he wasn’t. I slammed on the brakes and nearly had a heart attack.”
“That sounds traumatic.”
“It was.”
“Do you see this man a lot?”
“I see him enough.”
“What about the other symptoms? The apathy and social withdrawal.”