by Josh Emmons
7:58 p.m.
It was a surprise for Silas to learn that his waitress at the Red Lion Inn lounge was a friend of his great-niece Lillith’s, who ran into the bar and grabbed Tina by the hand and was pulling her out the door when Tina broke free and said she had to tip out and to fill in her time card, during which activities Lillith noticed her uncle and the two of them hugged awkwardly and established that she would give him a ride home.
“You’re sure it’s not too much trouble?” Silas asked. “And why aren’t you at home tonight? It’s Christmas Eve. Your mother must be disappointed.”
“She’ll get over it,” Lillith said. “Plus I’m a Wiccan. Christmas doesn’t mean anything to me, in a religious sense, that is.”
“It’s the ritual that’s important.” Silas had never believed this more than at that moment. “And what do you mean, you’re a Wiccan? What’s that?”
“It’s a type of neopagan. We’re witches, technically, and we’re like the fifth- or sixth-biggest religion in the country now.”
“I had no idea.”
“We keep pretty underground because there’s so much persecution of witches. Christians freak out about it and think we’re the devil. They attack us sometimes.”
“You’ve been attacked?”
“Not me personally. But other Wiccans have been beaten up and killed. It’s a pretty regular thing.”
Tina joined them and yelled good-bye to the bartender and they left, Silas following the girls to the car in the Red Lion Inn parking lot, where he was introduced to Franklin and got in the back next to his waitress, Tina, who was, like Lillith and Franklin, a junior in high school. Tina began talking. She’d only been working at the Red Lion Inn for two months, though it seemed longer given how little business the restaurant/bar/lounge got and how slowly time passed for Tina and her coworkers, who had to look industrious even when no customers were there to appreciate their industry. The manager thought that idle hands were the devil’s business, and he said so, often and with feeling. He had a nervous habit of asking the workers to tell him what they were doing all the time, even when it was obvious that they were prepping for the late-dinner crowd, folding napkins, or getting a customer a side of ranch dressing, and this habit annoyed the workers and made them in turn nervous and resentful of the manager and desirous of fucking him up one night in an anonymous alleyway ambush.
“So yeah, I kind of hate it,” she said to Silas, chewing gum and looking straight ahead. “Except sometimes I love it. The dishwashers are these crazy kids from Zoe Barnum, you know the alternative high school, and when the manager isn’t there we get stoned and play with the buffet table, which is the funnest thing in the world to do.”
“I’ll remember that,” said Silas.
Tina smiled and said, “You were my favorite customer tonight.”
“Thank you,” Silas said, blushing a little. He’d been in a peculiar mood all day and didn’t know exactly what he’d do when he got home. He had eaten a quarter pound of peanuts at least and memorized the beer mirror triptychs and exhausted the novelty of sitting among travel lodgers, and now perhaps he’d go to sleep. He thought of the conversation he’d had with Eve, the girl at the plasma donation bank, and felt that he’d spoken truly, that life did reintroduce wonder at its close. If not another childhood, old age was at least another occasion for discovery, like waking up from an afternoon nap to better appreciate the crepuscular light show. In the front Lillith and Franklin were talking too quietly for him to make out their conversation, so he leaned back in his seat and rested his eyes for a moment that became a long moment so that when he opened them he saw a sign for the turnoff to Arcata coming up. “Excuse me?” he said to Franklin, scooting forward and tapping the driver’s shoulder. “Aren’t you taking me home? I live in Eureka.”
“He does?” Franklin asked Lillith. “You do?” he said to Silas’s reflection in the rearview mirror.
“I told you he lives on E Street,” Lillith said.
“I thought you meant in Arcata.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. You should’ve said something before now. We’ve been going north for ten minutes already.”
“Goddamn it,” said Lillith. “Uncle Silas?” She turned around in her seat. “I’m sorry but we’re kind of late for an important event up at Moonstone Beach and we don’t have time to take you back to Eureka. Do you mind getting a cab back if we drop you off in Arcata?”
“A cab?” Silas said. “But I was just in Eureka. I would’ve walked if I’d known you couldn’t take me. I don’t have money for a cab.”
“We can give it to you.”
“I’m broke,” said Franklin.
“Me, too,” said Tina.
Lillith did an exaggerated double take. “What about your tip money?” she asked Tina.
“It was a shitty night and I only made ten bucks, and plus I owe five of it to my mom when I get home.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Lillith.
“He’s your uncle. You should give him the money.”
“I spent all my last paycheck on presents already.” Lillith slouched in her seat and twisted her hair around her left forefinger and brooded and said, “Uncle Silas, what if you come with us to the beach for just a little while, and then we can take you back later?”
Silas felt a gnawing in his stomach and burped painfully and although he’d been ambivalent about going home earlier, now he wanted nothing more than to be sitting in his recliner with a glass of buttermilk. “It’s forty degrees out. The beach is a terrible place to be. I want to go home.” Just then the highway rose in elevation and to the right he looked down on a valley where an aqua-green luminescence glowed from the treetops. Everything sylvan. Silas stared and felt a descending roller-coaster sensation.
“You can’t,” said Lillith.
Silas tried to suppress his elation in order to sound indignant. “Then you’re kidnapping me. I demand that you take me home now.”
Franklin looked at Lillith, who rolled her eyes and pointed forward. “He’ll get over it,” she said.
“I will not get over it!” Silas yelled from the backseat, getting into his role and delighted to be making a scene. “This is an attack on my dignity. Your mother’s going to hear about this.”
“It’s an emergency,” said Lillith. “We have to rescue someone from the Astral Plane. I don’t expect you to understand, but we have a limited amount of time to perform the spell, and so we can’t take you home right away. Sorry.”
The green exit sign for Moonstone Beach briefly flashed to life and then went black as they turned off the highway and into a parking area.
“We’re here,” said Lillith. “Uncle Silas, it’ll only take an hour or so. You can stay in the car and listen to the radio.”
“No, I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t. What we’re doing is for Wiccans only. It’s private.”
“I don’t want to sit in the car.”
“We don’t have time to argue. Please just stay here.”
“No.”
Through the window Silas could see outlines of the offshore rock islands. Lillith sighed and opened her door. Silas took off his seat belt and stepped out into the settled, wet cold of an evening beach at low tide.
“Let’s go to the fire log,” said Lillith, starting off down the beach. They trudged along the sand’s waterline until they came to a boomerang-shaped log the size of a family couch, where they stopped and rubbed their arms and their eyes adjusted to the dark. “Uncle Silas, could you at least stand over there while we talk about some things?” Lillith pointed to one end of the log. “Maybe you could look at the water or … or the sky. Or something.”
Silas moved to where he’d been directed and glanced noncommittally at the starry sky, a vast scroll of black taffeta with light pinpricks and it was a universe festooned. The ocean waves broke invisibly nearby, and it occurred to him that he’d grown complacent toward the beach
, what at one time he had most prized about living in Humboldt County. He’d taken beauty for granted and imagined that it had nothing new to offer him. And just then the sky seemed deeper than normal, both impenetrable and welcoming, a space to swim into and be, at last and forever, submerged. Let these kids have their rites and rituals and fairy tales; he’d be their prisoner if this was what it entailed.
“All right,” said Lillith, “Uncle Silas, since you’re here I may as well tell you what we’re doing, which is there’s a guy from Eureka who’s stuck in a place called the Astral Plane, where spirits and magical creatures live. The ancient Celts called it Búi, and they discovered that the wall separating it from us thins and thickens on a seasonal basis, and that sometimes a hole forms in the wall. That’s how gods and harpies and things get over here.”
“The hole is for them to come to us,” said Franklin, “not for us to go to them.”
“But somehow this local guy found a way to get over there, and he’s doing damage to the wall,” said Lillith, “and probably hurting himself at the same time, so we’re going to cast a spell that keeps him here permanently. According to our calculations, the wall is going to be at its thinnest in about ten minutes.”
“When it gets thin enough we should be able to override whatever magic is keeping him there and bring him back,” Tina said. “His name is Leon Meed. He’s from Eureka. He’s a burl sculptor.”
Silas hugged his arms to his chest. “I’ve heard something about him.”
While Silas had been off to the side, the girls and Franklin had inscribed a circle in the sand and built a small pile of stones in each of the four directions. Driven into the sand in the middle of the circle was an altar made of bundled twigs with a dinner plate affixed to the top.
“We’re going to begin by invoking the Lords of the Watchtower,” said Lillith, “which means we face the cardinal points and salute the god or goddess of that direction, in north-east-south-west order because that’s the order of increase as opposed to, um, decrease.”
Silas watched as they removed their shoes, entered the circle, held their hands out, palms up, and invited the direction gods to look favorably upon their request. Tina approached the altar and placed a small figure with a newspaper photo wrapped around its head onto the plate and said, “Poppet, I name you Leon Meed,” before stepping back into the circle.
Franklin sneezed and then placed three candles, a handful of dirt, a cup of water, and three lemon wedges around the poppet. He lit the candles and said, “By dark and by light, we beseech thee as we might, for all to be done and all to be right, return the captive to this site.” The plate wobbled dangerously.
“It’s going to tip over!” said Lillith anxiously.
“No, it won’t,” said Franklin. A gust of wind blew out the candles and Franklin steadied the plate and lit them again.
“I knew candles were a bad idea,” Tina said.
“Shut up,” said Franklin, “they’re more important than that Barbie doll you’re using for a poppet.”
Tina glowered at Franklin and Lillith said, “Quit ruining the atmosphere!” Then Lillith stepped forward and removed three joss sticks from her jacket pocket. Lighting them with the one candle that hadn’t gone out, she said, “We three pay honor and succor to the beings of the Astral Plane and conjoin our spirit to theirs therein. Hear our call. Feel our incantation. The mortal among you is a refugee and we humbly request his return to this world, so that he and we may gain through our contributions, to the greater glory of the Goddess and all in her dominion.”
Then Tina and Franklin joined her, and the three again placed their hands out, palms up, and with their eyes closed chanted together, “To the greater glory of the Goddess and all in her dominion … to the greater glory of the Goddess and all in her dominion.”
They turned their palms down and Lillith said, “The word goes forth and comes into being, so mote it be.”
Opening their eyes, the three looked at the altar for five full minutes and then walked backward out of the circle, at which point they put on their shoes and sat on the log.
“Are you through?” Silas asked them.
“Yes,” said Lillith. “Leon will be here any minute, and then we can go.”
“You think so?” Flickers of credulity had passed through Silas’s mind during the spell, when he had to acknowledge that pagan magic was as likely an explanation for Leon’s disappearance as anything else.
“We used a bunch of superpowerful aids to make sure that he comes back right away.”
Silas felt a certain excitement that maybe these kids’ fancy wasn’t fancy, and he would be lucky enough late in life to learn the truth about the universe and the gods and how life operated. Maybe he’d come full circle and wound up in a second childhood that was better and more illuminating than his first. He sat next to Lillith on the log and stared with them at the altar. And stared and stared. After two hours nothing had happened besides a loud argument. Tina accused Franklin of overloading the altar and not taking it seriously enough, and Franklin said that Tina’s crude Barbie poppet had been a mockery to the gods and it was no wonder Leon hadn’t come back, because if he had his body would have been that of a six-foot anorexic blond airhead. Silas sighed a slightly-but-not-too-disappointed sigh. And Lillith cried by herself in the car, where the conviction seized her that everything wrong was beyond her power to fix, that instead of coming away from the night a more powerful woman of goodness and change, she was to slink away an enfeebled and spirit-crushed little girl.
9:11 p.m.
Lenora was locked in the bedroom. Shane pounded on the door and told her she was being unreasonable, but she made no sound in response, not even to defend herself, because she was being selfish and ill-tempered and carrying this grudge like a baby to term. She was giving form and focus and substance to their marriage’s problems. She was showing that a certain harmony was now impossible and that maybe there would be less love and respect in their future together. Pouring their difficulties into a gelatin mold.
But Shane wasn’t going to let it get to him. He could adjust to the new state of affairs. If she was going to fall out of love with him he’d retaliate by falling out of love with her. Tit for tat. So he pocketed his wallet and left the house; while she festered and felt miserable he’d be at the Ritz, making acquaintances. Outside the dog whined, wanting food and affection. Like every animal in the world. Food and affection. On the afternoon he and Lenora had bought the dog, early in their marriage, Lenora had rested her hand on his thigh and said that she’d always believed that women were equal to men and should find self-validation and know their own desires, but that she needed a counterpart to complete her—not because she was female but because everyone needed a counterpart to complete them—and now she’d found Shane, and it was a wonderful feeling. She’d looked at him like he was a prophecy come to pass. Shane had said nothing and so implicitly agreed that he also felt fulfilled, though in fact he didn’t, in fact his marriage was a rote part of his move toward a respectable life and Lenora could have been anyone, it didn’t matter so long as she made him appear upstanding. Their love was a fiction, and fictions, like blue jeans, became more comfortable the longer you lived in them. Then like blue jeans they wore thin and tore apart.
The ripped black vinyl stool at the Ritz seemed to have been kept warm just for Shane as he slid onto it. He hadn’t been in a bar—not a bar bar—in so long that he’d forgotten how intimate they felt with their dark lighting and mood music and aromatic people. The opportunity for confession and seduction. The cloistered bacchanalia. He had a few drinks and they were like muscle relaxants and he learned the bartender’s name and looked around and saw a few prospects in the corner, talking among themselves, one brunette in particular looking cumhither fuckable. “You know them?” he asked the bartender, pointing to the corner ladies.
“They been here a few times.”
“Good to go, or what?”
“A few guys made their
moves.”
“Yeah? Any of them do okay?”
“They all did.”
“Those are my kind of odds,” Shane said too loudly, and tapped his glass to signal a refill. He had the idea that the bartender was bored and would welcome a discussion of Morland Memorial Services. He thought he might send complimentary drinks to the prospects. So he’d gotten in a fight and had lawful sex with his wife. So fucking what? There was something perverse about the way these days you could be demonized for doing what people had always done, what was part of human nature. Shane was no reactionary, he was fine with people asserting their rights, but the way you could be punished for exhibiting a little passion, now that showed a world out of whack.
“Yo,” he said to the bartender, “you have family in the area?” At that moment he felt a tap on the shoulder and turned around.
“Shane?” It was the faggot from the courthouse and Folie à Deux. “It’s me, Barry. I don’t know if you’re following me around, but I’m going to think it’s fate if we keep meeting like this.” He flashed the warmest, creepiest smile and there was so much neediness in his expression, so much enthusiasm that Shane felt ill.
Shane told himself to remain calm. Ignore the queer. Keep your nose clean. The prospects in the corner were doing tequila shots and the bartender went to the other end of the bar to grab some empty bottles for recycling. Shane put on his buck private mien and folded his thick arms. “Yeah, fate, that’s a good one.”
“What are you having?” Barry asked.
“A drink.”
“Oh, I love those!”
The door opened and a black man and white woman came in and sat at a table next to the prospects. Shane regarded them for a moment, the chess set couple. Why? Why did the woman do it? There were more than enough single white men out there for her. Why’d she have to be with a spearchucker? Some things Shane couldn’t explain just made him mad, like this beautiful blonde out with a black guy, and here was this fairy making eyes at him and acting for all the world like this was a pickup.