by Josh Emmons
I removed my soggy shoes and socks and went to the living room. The calendar said December 1. I turned on the television. Its programming was normal. I called my mother and asked if anything unusual had happened. She said what sort of anything. I said anything anything. She asked what was going on with my headache. I said it had gone away. She was overjoyed. I asked if I were still alive. This upset her, and she cried into the phone that I had to be on fearsome medication indeed if I’d lost sight of my own aliveness.
I hung up and got into bed. My mother phoned back many times but I didn’t answer. I was frightened and didn’t know what to expect. Had I lost my mind? Was I dead? Would I meet God? The devil? Would my life force fuse into nature?
I stayed in bed until the middle of the night, at which time I got hungry and ate two large turkey sandwiches. By early morning I decided that I hadn’t died or gone crazy. I’d had a little spell. I would get up and find my wife and daughter swimming. Everything would be okay. I slept until after noon.
As I expected, nothing was different in the living room when I woke up. The photo albums were where I’d left them. As were my books, food, clothes, cleaning supplies, and furniture. I watched television—news about a cataclysmic earthquake in India that had taken twenty-eight thousand lives—and then went to my studio.
There I was horrified. The burl was still a slab, not a statue. I looked for my sketch and it was gone. This made me frantic. Grabbing a carving knife, I prepared to make the opening shavings from memory, when I again found myself in the ocean. The water was calmer than it had been the day before, and I had an easier time keeping afloat. I recognized where I was. A hundred feet away the beach curved up to a buffer of sand brush above which the Louisiana Pacific Pulp Mill pumped black smoke into the air, indicating that this was the South Jetty in Eureka.
I dog-paddled for a minute and then was transported back to my studio. I ran to my bedroom and stayed in bed for two days, getting out only to eat and go to the bathroom. I don’t want to describe the scenarios that went through my mind. I ate, slept, and had panic attacks. The phone rang often during those two days, and I ignored it. My mother left messages threatening to come up to Eureka from her home near San Francisco if I didn’t call her back.
When the doorbell rang late one afternoon, I got up. My mother had arrived. I planned to make a clean breast of everything and welcome her suggestion that I check into a sanitarium. On the way to the door I stopped in the studio to look again at the burl slab, on the remote chance that it had reverted to my wife and daughter swimming. But the burl was the same raw object, the only difference being that now it seemed to mock me. It seemed hateful in its shapelessness and I was overcome with rage. I cannot explain even now how angry I became at that piece of inanimate wood.
The doorbell rang insistently, followed by loud knocking. My mother yelled from the front porch. The neighbor’s dog howled viciously. I decided to destroy the burl slab by chopping it into pieces. I decided to teach it a lesson and I was full of righteous fury.
From the fireplace, I grabbed an axe and returned to the studio and lifted it above my head to bring cleanly down upon the burl. I anticipated splinters flying and gnarled pieces falling to the ground. I saw the end of a confused and agonizing period in which the little solace I had left in this world had been replaced by a blank lump of featureless evil. At this point, however, on the verge of destructive satisfaction, I found myself in the ocean for a third time. The waves were rough, and the water felt colder than before. I was still in such a state about the burl slab that my heart beat wildly. I began to lose strength in my arms and felt the pull of the water on my legs. I yelled for help to two people I saw standing on the beach. I anticipated drowning and thought that maybe that’s what I should have done before. Maybe my fear of drowning had been a test, and if I passed it I’d sink to be with my wife and daughter. The real them and not their wooden counterparts. I expelled the air from my lungs. One of the figures on the beach had entered the water and seemed to be coming for me.
Instead of drowning, I found myself in the middle of a group of young people at a rock concert. I spoke with a raven-haired woman who told me I’d gone missing. This seemed incredible, for I had only been gone a few minutes, and when I asked the date and time she said it was nine in the evening on December 10. Days had somehow passed. The next thing I knew it was early morning and I stood in front of a living-room window, and then I was on top of a truck turning onto a road near Table Bluff. After that I was in a shower in someone’s bathroom. Then at some kind of basket celebration party. From then on I understood that time moved forward for me in fits and starts. Sometimes I lost mere hours going from one place to another, sometimes entire days.
I didn’t try to go home. Changing my clothes and showering would have been nice, but my regular visits to the middle of the ocean cleaned me off. On occasion I was presentable, although generally I wasn’t. I found myself going to the same places and meeting the same people, some of whom I talked to about what was happening. One man, Joon-sup Kim, told me at our last encounter a week ago that I was a collective hallucination he and Eve Sieber were having. He hadn’t pinpointed the cause yet, but he suspected lead in the water, radioactivity in the ground from nuclear waste buried nearby, or airborne fallout from weapons testing in Nevada. I stood in the dining area of the Better Bagel, where he worked, late one night after it had closed, while he swept up dust and bagel crumbs and said that I could be the result of years of chemical pollution along the Klamath River. Eve later told me she disagreed with Joon-sup and thought that I was a sign from God, a kind of unwitting prophet, sent to Earth to spark mass conversions to one of the Abrahamic faiths. She described herself as one of the masses. Although only a tool, I had led her to the one true God and shown that human tragedy—her boyfriend had just died—was inevitable but tolerable so long as people lived for Him. A teenage girl named Lillith Fielding, after seeing me show up in her room one evening as she sat with a boy and girl her age, excitedly explained that I’d been kidnapped by a pagan spirit and held captive in a hidden world called the Astral Plane, and that she and her neopagan friends had released me by casting a beach spell. Against my protestations that I had never heard of the Astral Plane, much less been there, she said that my “amnesia” was a favorite tactic of my kidnapper, the Horned Consort, when he’d failed at something in the human world and wanted to cover his tracks. An older man whom I recognized as a customer from Lou’s Drugs, Silas Carl-ton, compared me to visions children have, to a prelapsarian nodule of human consciousness accessible to people new or old to the life phenomenon. He said that only he and others who were beginning or finishing Consciousness could appreciate what I meant for the life of the mind.
It doesn’t matter to me anymore why this happened. My transports recently turned dangerous, and I don’t have much longer to consider the question. It was a sudden change. Whereas for over a month I bounced around Humboldt without incurring any harm to myself, a week ago I landed in trouble. I was sitting at the bar of the Ritz one night drinking a lemon cola when a man named Shane Larson introduced himself. We’d had an unpleasant encounter before, and I didn’t want to talk to him, but he ordered me another drink and acted very chummy. Much of what he said didn’t make sense—about weight lifting and the sales instinct and marriage—until he laid a hand on my shoulder and said that he was angry at me. With a smile so thin that a toothpick could hide it, he explained that I had deprived him of a sales commission at Folie à Deux. Because of me, he said, his wife would not get a surgery she needed. He had a ruddy complexion and a pitch-black receding hairline that came to a sharp point in the middle of his forehead. I didn’t touch the fresh lemon cola set in front of me. He said I could make up for my actions by allowing him to hand me over to the police so that he could collect the ten-thousand-dollar reward money my mother had posted. I owed him this, he claimed, and in return he would promise not to tell anyone that I’d been fooling them, letting them think I was miss
ing. We could invent a story that I’d been lost in the woods and he’d rescued me, or that I’d been sick and he’d found me. I could make up the fiction, he said.
I turned down his offer. He told me to think about it. I said no. He said I wasn’t listening to my best instincts, and that my conscience would punish me. He said he could spare me that pain. I put down money on the bar and left. When I looked back on my way out Shane was staring at his drink. Two minutes later, when I’d put the incident out of my mind, he caught up with me at the corner of Third and F Streets, twisted my arm behind my back, and marched me into an alley. He ran my head into a garbage can and said that he was going to take me to the police whether I liked it or not. Then he kicked me for a while and said he’d tell them that I attacked him and that he’d had to defend himself. He would collect the reward. To provide evidence for his story, he bit his left forearm so hard that blood poured down his chin, and then he shoved me into the back of his car.
As we drove through the night streets of Eureka, past liquor stores with partially burned-out neon signs and bail bondsmen’s offices, I examined the people on the streets, the bands of women and interlocked couples and single men, all with their pockets full and their thoughts tossing back and forth like shuttlecocks over their day jobs and night proclivities and presumptions of the past and future. I felt intensely connected to them—to a state of humanity I’d avoided for ten years. There were so many people, so happy and sad, high and low, with hands wishing for something to hold and heads wishing for something to hope. Despite my discomfort and Shane’s profane mutterings and reckless driving, the ride was invigorating, and I wanted it to last forever. I felt like I’d arrived at something.
Then, as we pulled into the police station parking lot, I was transported to the house of my old doctor, Steve Baker. It was morning and the place was empty. In the bathroom I found a mini pharmacy of Demerol, OxyContin, Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine, Equanil, meperidine, morphine, and paregoric: uppers, downers, routers, and loopers: an astonishing quantity of pills for every occasion. Concerned for Steve’s welfare—the last time I’d seen him he’d been reeling from the effects of one or more of these drugs—I loaded the bottles into a paper bag and left him an anonymous note saying, “Dr. Baker, if you continue to abuse drugs, I will respond appropriately.”
I walked several blocks and placed the bag in a trash can outside of a blue ranch-style house. Its door opened and Elaine Perry came out and stood on the stoop. She recognized me from her play rehearsal and wanted to know what I was doing in her garbage. I said I was throwing something away. She asked why I’d chosen her trash can specifically, and when I said it was a random choice, she shook her head and accused me of working for her husband, of helping him gather incriminating information to use against her in their divorce trial. She called me a muckraker and hoped I suffered for the part I’d played in this perversion of justice, because she hadn’t been the first one to treat her marriage vows like they were some youthful indiscretion she could ignore now that she was old enough to understand that the only purpose in life was to gratify one’s own desires. And she hadn’t abdicated her responsibilities as a parent and left their two sons to concoct wild fantasies about where she had gone. And she didn’t want Greg’s money. I was to tell him this for her, so he and I could end the smear campaign right away. She may have been a public school teacher, but she could provide for her two sons without his help, if that was what he wanted. She went back inside her house crying.
This was a painful experience, and although I didn’t know Elaine or her husband, I felt implicated. From the sidewalk in front of Elaine’s house, I blinked and found myself in a familiar shower stall. It was pitch black for a few seconds before a light went on and someone entered. I said hello and began to apologize for being there, leaving the shower curtain drawn so as not to scare the person. Almost immediately I was ablaze with pain as a very hard object—my guess is a crowbar—pummeled me from the other side of the shower curtain. I held up my hands and arms to protect my face as blows rained down upon my hips, shoulders, stomach, legs, arms, and then, because there must have been an exposed area, on my head.
I passed out and awoke in a kitchen, where I lay with my hands tied up in packing rope. I vomited from the pain and listened to a woman explain that she’d called the cops and would shoot me if I ever again broke into her house. Her name was Sadie, she owned a gun, and she was not kidding. I asked her to take me to the emergency room, and she said the police would decide about that. I told her what a mistake it was for me to be there, and that I meant her no harm, but again she deferred to the police, who very shortly knocked on the door.
When she went to answer it, I was transported to a leather couch in Steve’s living room. He came in as I was getting my bearings, and, after recovering from the shock of seeing me, he asked if I had written the note stuck to his bathroom mirror. I said I had, and he read me a riot act about the sanctity of a man’s medicine cabinet, and how I’d committed a serious crime, and how he was going to get the law involved. Then he asked what had happened to me at the Jambalaya a few nights before.
I opened my mouth to answer and found myself sitting at a table at Mazotti’s across from a black man pouring himself a glass of wine. He introduced himself as Prentiss Johnson and asked my name. I told him. Leon Meed was a good, solid name that I could be proud of, he said. He hadn’t gone to work that day and as a result had gotten a call from his manager, Mary Ellen, who was a gentle spirit, and he let his machine pick it up because his roommate Frost was gone already, and Mary Ellen said it was discouraging that he hadn’t called in to say he was sick or give an excuse. She had a great deal invested in Prentiss’s good working track record, and she hated to see him squander it on account of his feeling lazy that day.
He then asked if I would help him finish the half-empty carafe of wine in front of us. I told him I had to get to the hospital and he nodded in agreement. He could see I was suffering, just like him, except that my pain was physical while his was emotional. Prentiss put a large hand on my neck. He would buy me one drink at a nearby bar called the Shanty to make me feel better before I checked into the hospital. The doctors would likely make me wait a long time in the waiting room without any kind of painkillers, and I would wish I had had a single drink before coming, just to take the edge off. Plus he could use the company at the moment. I wasn’t to get him wrong—the folks at the Shanty were top quality—but you couldn’t take it to the next level with them. Did I know what he was saying? You’d be talking to one of them and it’d be well and good, and you’d be digging, but you’d never reach the next level. I was different, he could tell.
My few drinks at the Shanty were the first I’d had since my wife and daughter died—I was never a drinker although I had occasionally had wine at parties—and they numbed my aching bones and reduced the terror I felt at being me. Prentiss and I toasted the balmy weather and jointly selected tunes from the jukebox. After these drinks things seemed better. I told Prentiss about what was happening to me, and although he joked that I was taking it much deeper than the next level he’d been talking about, he believed me. He suggested that there were people who’d give anything to have my condition, to be able to travel across space without foreknowledge or explanation. Prentiss said I should relish the opportunity I’d been given instead of seeing it as an affliction. The fact that two people could lead identical lives and one would say it was heaven while the other said it was hell demonstrated the importance of perspective. Wasn’t happiness, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, and wasn’t it my duty, if I couldn’t change the world, to change myself?
Then the exuberant stage of drunkenness passed and I became morose and self-pitying. Nobody had ever had it as badly as I did, I said. I was condemned to a long state of existential whiplash, unable to settle anywhere. I was the unluckiest person alive and when a man with osteoporosis stumbled into the Shanty and ordered a drink and was refused service and told to get out and f
ell over a chair and lacked the reflexes to break his fall with his hands, and thus smashed his forehead on the ground and everyone in the bar looked away, I thought that even he was better off than I was.
Prentiss wiped his lips and looked at the jukebox as the last song we’d programmed ended. Sometimes, he said, he thought the blues was the most honest type of music; at other times he thought only fools felt sorry for themselves. It was impossible to know which feeling was right.
Shane entered the bar then and, seeing me, stopped in the middle of the room. He wore black and his hair was wet. He approached me and said he was sorry. His wife had almost left him. The night I’d escaped he’d gone home and she’d cleared out all her things. He was humbled. And he deserved it. He’d let greed and rage get the best of him. There was no excuse for it. He’d been bad before and then improved and then lapsed again into even worse behavior. He held out his hand and I shook it.
At that instant I found myself at home, where I’ve been since this morning. I don’t know why I’ve come back any more than I know why I left. Possibly I’m not grasping something elemental, the thought of which seizes me as I get up and wander the house, reexamining objects bought in a happier time, when I was married and a father and never conceived of being alone. I’ve visited the burl slab in my studio, unchanging as a monolith, and in that piece of wood, I’ve thought, is an answer. I wouldn’t know where to begin finding it, though. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve walked around the slab and felt its fibrous skin and not threatened it with an axe, and I’ve watched it in the different morning and afternoon lights and almost picked up my pencil to draw a sketch of what it could be, that great unknown, almost seeing through its roughness to a shape within.