by Josh Emmons
“I went with a bunch of people to southern Humboldt last week to protest a Pacific Lumber clear-cutting project, and after I saw Leon there I didn’t want to have anything to do with the protest. I thought it was pointless, so I came home early and haven’t talked to my friends. I’ve been sullen and antagonistic. I feel anxiety and self-doubt.”
“You’re good at recognizing what’s wrong. Most people with schizophrenia aren’t aware of their illness and so they resist treatment. Your desire to get well is going to be one of your best weapons in doing it.”
Joon-sup stared at the floor.
“I wonder,” said Sadie, “if you take any drugs now, prescription or otherwise?”
He shook his head. “Not since I began hallucinating.”
“Were you taking drugs before then, that first time?”
“I may have been smoking marijuana.”
“You may have?”
“Okay, I was. I was stoned, and so for a while that was how I explained it to myself. But then after the protest I knew that it wasn’t the drugs. There’s something wrong with my brain.”
“Is there a history of mental illness in your family?”
“My aunt was involved with Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that pumped sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in the 1990s.”
“Does your hallucination tell you to do certain things?”
“Leon? He wants me to bring him food.”
“Your hallucination is hungry?”
“He can’t get to any restaurants or supermarkets.”
Sadie didn’t notice her blouse’s tear when she adjusted her glasses on her nose. “What’s your diet like? And your physical regimen. Do you exercise?”
“I play Ultimate Frisbee. And I eat, you know, everything. Lots of vegetables. Lots of barbecue. I’m hoping to open my own restaurant, which is one of the reasons I’m so upset about my schizophrenia. It could hurt my chances to get a loan. Once I have a record of being mentally unstable, my life is going to be harder.”
“I wouldn’t assume that you’re going to get that record.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not convinced that you have schizophrenia.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Seeing someone who isn’t there could be stress related. Or it could be a side effect of recreational drugs. In many significant ways you seem to me sound and in full possession of your mental faculties. I wouldn’t want to recommend hospitalization unless you felt like you were a threat to yourself or to others.”
“No, but—”
“I’m willing to prescribe a neuroleptic—an antipsychotic—and see how you respond. That’s the best way to proceed from here. Think of it like there’s no need to give you anesthesia for a headache if a couple of aspirins will do the trick.”
Joon-sup said, unfolding his hands, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think you hear what I’m saying. I’m a sick man.”
“I’m going to start you on chlorpromazine and fluphenazine. And I’m going to give you my card and suggest we set up a meeting for a month from now. It takes a couple of weeks for the medication to take effect. I have my own practice in Henderson Center, so call there after Christmas and my secretary will arrange a time that works for you.”
With that Sadie took out a pad of paper, scribbled in small, illegible cursive, and handed the prescription to Joon-sup, who stood and left without saying anything.
5 p.m.
At home Elaine found that her children had what it took to be mobsters in charge of ransacking operations. They’d mastered search and destroy. Witness the inside-out clothes blanketing the floor, the video game cartridges launched two rooms away from their storage box, the bowls of slushy cereal and coloring books and board game pieces and (her) jewelry and (their) marbles and coins and sports equipment and dirty napkins and spilled juices and bric-a-brac everywhere. All in just two hours. It was amazing the thoroughness of the chaos. A butterfly flaps its wings in Mozambique and there’s a tornado in a Eureka home. Elaine was overwhelmed before she even started cleaning—look at it, where to start?—but then she willed herself into collecting the clothes under one arm and the dishes in one hand. Every thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. Her older son was nine, fifteen years younger than the boy who’d overdosed next door. Fifteen years between an immune system destroyed by pleasure and one that had never known anything impure, save the junk food Abe quaffed at every allowance. Why did people turn from innocence to experience, knowing as they did the final outcome? So many reenactments of the Fall. So like moths to a flame.
Fifteen years ago she’d been set to enter a PhD program in English, had written an acceptance letter to Duke University and prepared to take out massive loans to fund seven years of rigorous and mind-building study, had convinced Greg that Durham, North Carolina, was a beautiful town in which to practice medicine and raise children when he finished medical school. She arranged for everything. But then, overnight, she decided not to go. Told Duke she couldn’t come for personal reasons. Greg was relieved and so was she. Her career, whatever it would be, could wait. So she substitute taught and then had Abraham and then Trevor. She got a master’s degree in teaching at Humboldt State University. And soon after that she had a permanent job and a broken marriage and an ailing father and two unhappy children and a blackmailing principal and a craven addiction to bologna sandwiches. The house looked better.
Putting off the rest of the cleaning until later—the boys were outside playing and could tidy up a little when they got in—she grabbed a six-hundred-page mystery novel and lay on the couch and sank gratefully into the story of a homicidal maniac being hunted by Philadelphia’s premier celibate police inspector. Fifteen years ago she’d lived on a steady diet of George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy and Charlotte Brontë; now it was mass quantities of mass market paperbacks. Her standards had fallen off a cliff. She felt like a one-time vegetarian eating cheeseburgers three times a day. This tectonic shift away from virtue and self-discipline. Was it just a variation on that boy-next-door’s slide from a chemical-free life to a heroin habit? Were we all deteriorating, and only some of us showed it? She closed her book.
6:33 p.m.
“What are you doing?” asked Carl Frost as he knocked and then opened the door to Prentiss’s bedroom and leaned against a grandfather-clock-sized chest of drawers.
“I’ll give you three guesses.” Ties were laid out on Prentiss’s bed like a salesman’s samples beside a pair of black trousers and light-glinting shoes, and he was buttoning up a stiff white shirt he’d bought earlier that afternoon. It still had section creases from the cardboard square around which it had been wrapped in plastic sealing; it was hopeful and stiff and nervous.
“It looks like you’re putting on a suit.”
Prentiss picked up an amoeba-patterned tie and examined it for stains. “You must be taking the ginkgo and the vitamin B complexes.”
“My question is why?”
“Got a date.”
“Slow down. This is the first I’m hearing about it.”
“And it’ll be the last.”
“Why’s that? Is it a man?”
“Fuck you.”
“Then tell me who it is. I tell you about all my women.”
“Don’t know what women that’d be.”
“How about Justine? The one I scored at the Rathskellar where an hour after I meet her she’s calling me Daddy. I told you about that. My pimp ratings soared through the roof and you know it.”
Prentiss buttoned his collar—tight—and tried not to think about what Frost was saying, because the past was history and this Justine-Frost thing happened and that’s that and there ain’t no point getting all worked up about it. We all of us got pasts, and none of us is a saint and we’re not pure and we’re animals that do animal things but that doesn’t make up the whole picture. Prentiss himself had done things that he’d rather not have Justine know about because we’re all on a journey that’s bound to have a few wron
g turns and her peccadillo before she met him was, so what.
Frost said, grooming his mustache with his thumb and middle finger, “You’re the one who hasn’t gotten any since you moved in.”
“We’re not going to talk about this.”
“You’ve been dry for months. It worries me.”
“That’s a waste of compassion. I’m all right so you can go back to whatever you were doing before you stopped by for this friendly chat.”
“No, seriously. I’m glad you have a date. Everyone deserves someone, especially you since you’re such a good guy. You know, when I was grinding on Justine I thought about sending her into your room when I was done, just to give you a little.”
“You’re a generous man.”
“You can thank me later.”
“Okay, then.”
“And don’t think of it like affirmative action,” Frost said. “Don’t be like, ‘mercy fuck,’ because it’s not like that.”
Prentiss’s chest tightened and he was going to ignore the implications of this because they were ambiguous and could be read in dozens of different ways but no wait hold everything. Hold the pots and pans. Still the racket. There was a veiled significance to Frost’s words. Prentiss bent over and pulled a ferocious knot in his shoelaces. Standing up with tucked-in white shirt and black slacks. He looked at Frost and he had a real fucked-up sensation of being hollowed out at this particular moment. Because he was doing some serious deduction. What now, why did he have to think this? Like maybe Justine was going out with him on account of Frost told her to. Prentiss felt sick. It made sense from a certain angle, because he was just a drunk nigger working the stacks of the public library—thirty-two years old and taking baby steps toward sobriety and had a queen for a sponsor and he was never going to be a white lawyer—and she was this beautiful white girl who Frost could have put up to it. Prentiss was a charity case, was how she would see it. And here Frost was toying with him trying to get him to brag about Justine so Frost could laugh and say that he’d masterminded the whole thing, that he had so much control over this pussy that he could give it away.
“You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?” said Prentiss. Despite himself his voice broke.
Frost straightened up and turned in the doorway. “If you get tired of her in the morning, send her back my way. I’ll be asleep but that don’t matter.”
Send her back my way. As good as admitted it. Prentiss couldn’t remember feeling so sick without having gotten drunk first. Except maybe once when he was a kid and had been friends with a boy named Phil and they’d ridden bikes together through Old Town and gone looking for sea anemones at Centerville Beach and they’d been blood brothers until one day when Prentiss was crouched behind a hedge at recess, just playing by himself, he heard Phil tell Travis Jacobson that Prentiss was a stupid nigger, and that he only played with him because his parents made him “be nice to the black boy.” Prentiss remembered that moment so well he could still feel the hedge digging into his skin with its leaves and thousands of gnarled branches. He could hear Travis’s laugh in Frost’s, and disappointment and shame blended together in him like a double malt scotch. One rough liquid. His eyes stung. People are nice to you because they feel sorry for you.
“I got to take a piss,” Prentiss said, brushing past Frost. And inside the bathroom he shut and locked the door and punched the wall tiles in the shower, kicked at the tub, and beat the porcelain, and converted his tears to rage—such a small alchemy—and kept doing it until he couldn’t anymore and had to sit down on the rim of the tub, like a bird dazed from flying into glass.
7 p.m.
“The very thought of water in a public place makes me queasy,” Alvin said, watching Barry pack his towel and swimsuit into a deflated nylon duffel bag.
“I won’t tell you about it later,” Barry said. He couldn’t find his goggles. Or his flip-flops. He stepped over Alvin’s legs dangling from the bed and ran his hand behind the laundry basket, where so much dust had collected he was tempted to forgo swimming and sweep the floor instead. Except that he’d made a new resolution—to be super-toned, super quickly—and shouldn’t set the wrong precedent. Who knew when he’d next need to impress someone (Shane) with his shirt off, when the mystery of his body would be revealed (to Shane) and a soft belly might make everything else soft (God forbid)?
“Want to meet at the Ritz later, around eight thirty?” Alvin asked.
“I’m not sure I’ll be done by then. How about nine thirty?” Barry said this casually, yet it seemed to elicit a look of suspicion from Alvin. Was his motivation for swimming obvious? Or that he was worrying more than normal about his appearance? Barry had to relax. They’d only known each other for two weeks. He thought of the parable about the dog on a bridge with a bone in its mouth that sees its own reflection in the river below and barks for the reflected dog’s bone. Its bone falls into the water and the dog is left with nothing. Alvin was stable and a known quantity and Shane might want nothing to do with him and to pursue him he’d be throwing away a sure thing for this chance in a thousand. Though perhaps it wasn’t like the dog parable at all, because wasn’t that impossible chance, that minuscule possibility, if its success offered a great enough reward, the one Pascal insisted we take in order not to lead lives of tragic inconsequence? His wager that we had everything to gain? Of course Pascal was talking about faith in God, but love was love was love.
7:22 p.m.
At A.J.’s Market, Steve picked up a package of Hob-Nobs—its waxy orange paper read One nibble and you’re nobbled—and walked down the aisle past the disposable toiletries, his thoughts an auctioneer’s soliloquy about the plastic razors and cotton swabs that would end up in California City, a town of hundreds of empty desert square miles that was slowly turning into a full-time landfill in the Mojave Desert. What would the state do when California City ran out of space? Where would it look? Steve momentarily forgot why he’d come to A.J.’s. Orange juice. He set down the Hob-Nobs next to the nasal decongestants and went to the partially frosted glass refrigerator doors to select a gallon of juice and a small tub of cream cheese. At the cash register the clerk rang him up and Steve pulled out money and then said to wait a minute. A Korean guy behind him in line made no sign of impatience. Steve ran to the nasal decongestants, snatched the Hob-Nobs, and ran back to add them to his purchases. “Could I get a receipt?” he asked.
He ripped off the top of the orange juice container at the door on his way out and took a long, deep drink. His craving for the juice was intense. Why had he gone back for the Hob-Nobs? He only liked the chocolate-covered kind and these were plain. He wasn’t even hungry. The Methedrine he’d taken an hour ago. A.J.’s had the dirtiest parking lot in the world. Vivid potato-chip wrappers like sloughed-off shells, as if the chips had molted and crawled away as so many chip bodies, and the soda cups and beer cans and shattered glass and cesspuddles of oily urine with incoming rivulets of spit and blood. It was horrible. Steve drank more orange juice and this was an apocalyptic scene. The door opened behind him and the Korean guy crossed the lot—the landscape of riotous decay—to a faded green van. Steve felt like he understood California City then and looked up at the A.J.’s door, atop which was a silver video camera, a raptor cold and bloodthirsty, panning from left to right to left. Steve no longer craved the orange juice. He wanted to throw it away or dump it into the cesspuddles. Crumble the Hob-Nobs into dust and scatter them to the wind, for all is vanity.
His heart beat like a hummingbird’s and the still air whistled.
The Korean guy came back across the lot toward him and said, “My van’s not starting and I think it’s the battery. Do you have jumper cables? I took mine out last weekend for some reason.”
“Jumper cables?” Steve didn’t want to go home with the orange juice and sit there all night staring at photo albums of Anne; perhaps he’d meet up with Greg later. He went to his car and opening the trunk left tracers on his eyes as though the world were made of taffy, and he
gave a thumbs-up sign to the Korean guy. He stood up straight and the cables writhed in his hand like red and black snakes. He drove to the van and parked facing it, the front bumpers four inches apart.
Hovering over the exposed engines, the two men began arranging the cables positive to positive and negative to negative.
“Thanks a lot for this. My name’s Jack, by the way.”
“I’m Steve.”
“Yeah, this is a corroded battery; I may have to get a new one but I’m—”
“Would you excuse me?” Steve left one of the cables unclamped and grabbed the Hob-Nobs from his front seat and jogged back to A.J.’s.
Joon-sup watched him go and couldn’t do anything more by himself, so he leaned against the side of the van and felt head-sore. He’d had a hard day since learning that he wouldn’t be hospitalized. He’d spent hours doubting Dr. Jorgenson’s professional competence and resolved to get a second opinion. His interview had been so superficial that only the most careless of doctors could have concluded anything on its basis.
As he stood there a knock on the window came from inside his van. He turned around and his worst fear was confirmed: Leon sitting behind the wheel, waving at him.
“I’m having trouble with the door!” came Leon’s muted voice as he knocked on the window again and pointed down. Joon-sup looked at him and could not tell a hawk from a handsaw. He wanted to get Steve but knew that Steve would see nothing there, for Leon was only a hallucination in his mind—he felt like a lucid dreamer recognizing the irreality of his environment—so he ignored it. Hallucinations were like royalty or paper money, worthless if you didn’t believe in their value. “I’m sorry about being here,” Leon said, rolling down the window. “Is there a trick to the door or something?”
Joon-sup fought the urge to answer, like suppressing a cough, and when Steve returned without the Hob-Nobs, Joon-sup didn’t point to Leon because Leon was gone.