by Josh Emmons
“Sadie,” said Marlene, obviously divining her sister’s feelings about Roger, “did you know that Roger spent six months living in Lisbon?”
Sadie had always wanted to visit Portugal. “No.”
“It’s true,” said Roger. “I was working on my dissertation and had friends with a condo in Lisbon they weren’t using. It’s a beautiful city.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“I have a photo album full of pictures from that year if you’d ever like to see them.”
“I’m sure they’re interesting.”
Lisbon didn’t provoke further discussion—it was an easily exhaustible subject—so Sadie took more frequent sips of her drink and looked around at people sitting at other tables, all of whom were laughing and hooting and yelling out punch lines and tickling one another and in general having a blast. Everyone else’s lives seemed at their best when yours was at its worst. Being single when others were a couple. Not having anyone when people you knew had the comforts of intimacy and love and confidence and sex and companionship and relief from the idea that we are solitary creatures. For much of her life—her single life, anyway, which was largely the same thing—Sadie had viewed her friends in relationships as a negative commentary on her. They stated implicitly that two were better than one, that safety lay in numbers. And wasn’t this reinforced by every movie, book, and television show in existence? Wasn’t it understood that no more horrible fate existed for women than becoming old maids? Yet at this moment, sitting beside Roger and considering her options—to set aside her preferences and settle for him and thence be coupled, or to follow her inclinations and reject him and remain alone—she felt that this global old-maid understanding was superannuated and untrue. For security and comfort came in many guises, and she could be single without being inadequate. She could, even, be envied for it. For living the life she wanted. Defining herself according to who she was rather than in relation to someone else. She wouldn’t buy into the tyranny of couples and chain herself to someone just for the sake of being chained. If love came, wonderful. If not, she would resist eulogies for all the might-have-beens.
“Roger.” Steve leaned forward in his chair, his left eye twitching like he had tic douloureux. “Do you think that honesty is the most important thing in making a relationship work?”
“Why bother with more small talk, huh?” Roger said with a chuckle.
“It was getting old,” seconded Greg, looking at Steve warily.
“Seriously, I’m curious,” said Steve.
“That depends,” Roger said, upending his drink and tonguing an ice cube the way Sadie imagined a salamander would, “on the level and degree of honesty you’re talking about. Honesty should play a minor role in the minor issues—such as how your partner looks in a certain outfit, or how much you like an anniversary gift—and a major role in the major issues—such as whether or not you love each other, and the degree of your discontentment in life, and of course sexual fidelity.”
“Aha!” said Steve. “So you think a relationship where there’s sexual deceit is a bad relationship.”
“I don’t think it’s healthy, no.”
“Herr Doctor,” said Greg, and you could detect the ridicule with which he said the word “doctor,” “don’t you think that people’s hang-ups about fidelity are too exaggerated? I mean, if you were to stray—and everyone’s human—and if it didn’t interfere with your love for the person you’re with, then wouldn’t it be better not to say anything about it?”
Roger folded his hands into a chin rest. “That’s the adulterer’s million-dollar excuse. And it’s unfounded for three reasons. One, it establishes an arbitrary system of disclosure and honesty that, if continued, will lead people to lie at random for the sake of their own convenience and to avoid responsibility for their actions. Two, lying about infidelity signifies a contempt for the person being lied to, an unwillingness to let them decide whether to continue the relationship with all the facts at hand. Three, it’s selfish and greedy.”
“I agree,” said Steve, looking positively deranged.
“That’s, I don’t know, a hard line to take,” said Greg, moving his empty wineglass to the middle of the table. “Oh, look, the band’s about to start up again.”
And so it was. Music and dancing and drinking. Greg took Marlene to the dance floor followed by Roger and Sadie. Steve stayed at the table contemplating an Equanil and an exit-door confession to Marlene. Roger cut in with Marlene and Greg obligingly switched over to Sadie. Steve rearranged the drink glasses on the table and thought about writing Marlene a note. Sadie returned to the table and sat down. Greg cut back in with Marlene. Roger sat next to Sadie. Steve got up and tapped Greg on the shoulder and danced with Marlene, where after a minute of frenetic box stepping they switched to a slow-dance stationary basic.
“I have to tell you something,” Steve said, trembling like a greyhound.
“What’s that?” Marlene asked.
“It’s about Greg. He’s sleeping with a nurse from ER, and with other women, too. He’s not capable of monogamy. I think you should know this.”
“Oh.”
“It’s for your own safety that I say it.”
“My safety?”
“I mean your own good.”
“I’m going to sit down now. Thanks for the dance.”
Steve was left on the dance floor, where couples glided past him and a few loners swayed in time. His head felt like a microwave, so many atom thoughts were pinging and ponging around inside. Perhaps he was radioactive. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything to Marlene. His future ex-wife, Anne, was probably now in bed with the guy who had answered the phone at her place the night before. The music felt like water and he had a hard time moving through it to a table, to any table but his own, because he needed to sit down.
“Here,” said a man in an open-collared shirt and wool pants, with a poet’s head of short curls, next to whom Steve found himself, “have a seat.”
“Thanks.” Steve sat at a table just to the side of the stage and looked at the man and played with a drink coaster and craved an Equanil and wondered if honesty weren’t really a kind of poison disguising itself as nectar. Maybe it was unnecessary. He looked harder at the man, whose face had Pop Art coloring. “A lot of people are looking for you, Leon.”
“I know.”
“How’s your knee?”
“Never been better.”
“I’m a good doctor.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re one of 850,000 missing people a year,” Steve said. “Just one.” The room began to throb with color then, and the music was the sound of a great factory, a caterwaul of churning and churning and production. Steve rubbed his eyes and said, “It’s not right. You can’t just disappear. We’re all connected and there’s a ripple effect. You create a void and other people fall into it. You’ve got to come back. You’ve got to keep living your life.”
“Doctor Baker, are you okay?”
“I’ve said too much.” There was a silence. “What do you think?” Leon was gone. Steve looked under the table and his head was spinning.
“Hey, get up,” Greg said, standing over Steve and taking off his jacket. “I said get up.”
“What is it?”
Greg folded his arms and his expression was an angry football coach. “Now’s not the time to play dumb. Get up.”
“I’m sitting here. I just saw Leon Meed.”
“You’re going to tell me what you said to Marlene and why, and you’re going to do it now.”
Steve looked at the empty chair where Leon Meed had just been. “Because people don’t exist to be used,” he said.
“I’d like to know what people exist for but I’m too pissed off right now to ask. So get up.” And with that Greg lifted Steve up and they were face-to-face and Steve felt disembodied.
“Greg,” said Marlene, squeezing in between the two men, “come on. You’ve done enough damage for one night.”
>
“I haven’t started.”
“Yes, you have. And you’ve finished. Let’s go.”
Greg stared at Steve and shook his head slowly, then questioningly, then dismissively. “Yeah, let’s go.”
The fireworks in Steve’s head stopped and he lay down to rest.
11:57 p.m.
Elaine’s children were asleep. She prayed that visions of sugarplums were dancing in their heads. The stocking stuffers were wrapped—the candies, action-figure toys, putties, and coloring utensils—and the presents laid out and the tree lit. Greg hadn’t called, which was fine with her although the kids were devastated. Had he always been capable of such lapses? Had she been out of her mind when she married him and bore his children and believed his declarations of love? No. Everything had been in its right place. There’d been a kernel of truth in every “I love you,” and she shouldn’t chalk up his current promiscuity and divorce wranglings and child neglect to pure evil, but instead to a drift in his affections and interests that caused awful collateral damage. He wasn’t malicious; he just orbited in a sad galaxy of solipsism. She went through the house clearing away his books and music and folders and favorite decorations. One box, two boxes, three boxes full. Santa could do more than give; he could take away.
At the end of which she was tired and went outside, where a nickel-sized moon shone upon a row of bicycles and a broken-tonged rake next to the garage. Elaine accidentally knocked the bicycles over and then got in her car. The motion-detector porch light came on. She put South Pacific in the stereo and reclined her seat. After the overture, a medley of the soundtrack’s most epic melodies, came the opening keen of “Bali Ha’i”: “Most people live on a lonely island/ Lost in the middle of a foggy sea/ Most people long for another island/ One where they know they would like to be.” She’d outlast her divorce and the sexual intrigues of Muir Elementary School and the suspicion that she’d failed her children and father. She’d outlast her regret. And although perhaps she should have gotten a PhD and married Daniel Fitzribbon and lived in rural Pennsylvania—her once-upon-a-time dream state—the alternative she’d chosen had led her to this precise moment, and it was better to think of it as an opportunity than as a repercussion. Life was the words we dressed it up in, and if we thought sometimes that we were acted upon rather than actors, it was a temporary misunderstanding. Elaine thought of everything she could do. “Bali Ha’i may call you/ Any night, any day/ In your heart, you’ll hear it call you/ Come away … come away.”
Yet she wouldn’t come away. She would stay where she was and continue to make mistakes and err and be human and forgive and be divine, and if she got fired she got fired. She loved her children. She liked her job. She even liked Eureka, and stranger things had happened than a single mother divorcee with a sick father and uncertain professional future finding a shard of happiness and caring for it and, however long afterward, discovering that this was enough. Stranger things happened all the time.
11:59 p.m.
Eve was in the gully in Sequoia Park where she and Ryan had once done acid and sat with perfect stillness for three hours as a test of their willpower. The drug tried to make them fidget and beat the ground and scream and get up and rub their faces in the ferns and run along trails and leap spasmodically into the air, but they triumphed over it. And when the test was over they got swervily to their feet and grinned at each other and their bodies felt like they’d been cryogenically frozen, though their minds had been afire, so they lightly scratched each other’s arms and were amazed at the sight sound touch as they Adam and Eve’d (and she was Eve, this wasn’t role-playing) through the park, naming the plants and animals they saw and laughing for no reason, the most innocent phenomenon. And when they came down from the acid and were cast out of the park—leaving because they had to meet people downtown—they saw each other for the first time, despite their knowing every inch of the other’s curvilinear bodies and faces, despite the blindness that familiarity breeds. Love remade all.
But after that day their love was beaten down by three hard years of living together and Ryan’s degeneration and Eve’s awareness that life was not a banquet of opportunities to which she could return again and again until she was ready to lie down forever. Life was a life sentence: You shall not rise above your station. And now Ryan was dead although it didn’t seem possible, a tragedy the size of all disappointment. Faith was harder than titanium, faster than light, more mercurial than water. Somebody had once told her that Christ was wonderful and Christians terrible. She wouldn’t go that far—the people at church that morning were too bland to be terrible, not even a case of the banality of evil—and anyway what interested her was less Christ than God. Maybe she was Jewish. Though it wasn’t God as He was known popularly, the Ancient of Days with a wizened face and carefully drafted covenant; it was God as the ultimate investor of meaning. An entity that laid out morality and gave life a knowable purpose. A God who didn’t so much promote our humility as rescue us from triviality. From childhood she’d suspected that every action had a consequence that did more than mandate behavioral caution or karma—if I do something bad, something bad will happen to me—that pointed to a larger ethical structure in the universe for us to explore and affirm. Eve had been given hints of God’s existence—while Derivative sang its spirituals she’d found and lost Leon Meed—and didn’t know why she’d failed to draw the proper conclusion.
Faith before then had had the connotations of a prison cell.
Faith she now saw was an undying Yes.
From somewhere nearby in the forest she heard a rustling of rocks and branches.
“Is someone there?” she asked, her voice surprisingly steady. It occurred to her that one of the dozens of homeless people who camped in the forest could come by and casually murder her.
“Yeah,” said a man invisible in the night.
“Do you live in the park?” Eve asked, not afraid though fear seemed like the right response. She felt calm. “Do you know Hortense? I’m friends with him. He knows I’m here.”
“I don’t know Hortense. And I don’t live here. I’m just walking around. Don’t mean to scare you. My name’s Joon-sup, but you can call me Jack.”
“Do you have a jacket I could wear just for a minute? I’m freezing.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty warm from walking.” Joon-sup wended his way through nettles and mosses and ferns to Eve’s clearing, where a patch of moonlight struck her hair and arms and feet, though her face and hands were in shadow.
“Thanks,” Eve said. “I’m almost too cold to get up and walk home. I mean, that’s an exaggeration, but still. What are you doing here?”
Joon-sup shuffled off his coat and handed it to her and stumbled a little. “I had nowhere to go tonight and it’s Christmas Eve so here seemed like a good place to think.”
Eve put on the thick down jacket, which smelled of sandalwood. “What do you need to think about?”
“A lot of stuff. What are you doing here?”
“Trying not to think. My boyfriend died today. I’m trying not to think about that.”
“I’m sorry. That’s horrible. That’s … how did it happen?”
“Drug overdose.”
“When was … how old was he?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you … I mean, did you find him?”
“Yeah. But let’s not talk about it. I talked about it all day. I’ll probably talk about it for all the days to come. I’m feeling peaceful right now.”
“I could tell you what I’m thinking about if you want. To take your mind off it for a minute.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Probably not. I know crazy people and you don’t seem like them.”
“But even I think I’m crazy. Not in a dangerous way, just in a crazy way.” Joon-sup lit a cigarette. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“We’re i
n the great outdoors.”
“That’s true.”
“And besides I smoke, too.”
“Oh, then, do you want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Okay. So where was I?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Yes. It started with my mother.”
“Come on, I thought you were serious.”
“On the phone—she lives in Pusan, where I’m from—we talk about her wanting me to be married and me not wanting to be married, and we fight over it a lot. So it got to the point where I ignored everything she said, and then I started to feel guilty, and then one day I was driving along and I saw a man disappear right in front of me.”
Eve smiled and felt like the Cheshire Cat, like only her smile existed.
“I was driving down Fifth Street when this guy appeared in the middle of the road and then he was gone just as I was about to hit him,” Joon-sup continued. “I could describe him perfectly; that’s how real the hallucination was. Last week I met him in the forest, and we had a conversation and he told me how he disappears.”
Eve stood up and held out her hand. “That’s crazy, all right.”
“Yes.”
“You know what’s even crazier?”
“What?”
“I’ve seen him, too.”
Part II
January 15
I’m badly injured. I’m writing this because I’ll be dead soon and I want to leave a record of my last days. My name is Leon Meed. I don’t know how much longer I have so I’ll write until I finish or until I can’t go on anymore. The bruises on my arms and face are healing, but the ones on my lower torso have spread into each other. These are the ones that concern me. A solid six-inch black band encircles my waist and probably accounts for my constant abdominal cramps. A Merck Medical Guide is sitting on my desk, but I won’t look at it. I want to be one of the few Americans who can’t name what’s killing him.