by Josh Emmons
Part III
1
Once, if you had stayed longer than you’d intended in Eureka, postponing your northern trip for whatever reason, you would have heard the story of how the city got its name. A short but revealing tale, it began with The word “Eureka” and ended on the town never recovered. The polite thing would have been to listen and nod along, just as the prudent thing would have been to remember that stories, like all copies of a lost original, leave out more than they include, that they are the shorthand with which wisdom overlays fact and fiction—where conclusions lurking in a distant penumbra can, with patience, be formed. Stories, you would have kept in mind, reward concentration.
The word “Eureka,” Greek for “I have found it,” was shouted by Archimedes of Syracuse when he discovered how to verify that the king’s new crown was pure gold by immersing it in water, measuring the volume displaced, and dividing the crown’s weight by that figure to establish its density. He was so excited, according to legend, that he jumped naked from his bath and ran screaming down the street Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! He’d sat down in a tub of water intending only to get clean, and instead alighted on a way for all future generations to distinguish real gold from its fakes and forgeries, its fool’s counterfeits. He had shown that you could find what you needed when looking for something else.
The town of Eureka in California came more than two thousand years later, in 1850, when a motley group of seasoned and amateur prospectors traveled upstate from the Sierra Nevada Mountains hoping to locate a new outpost of the Gold Rush. When they reached a strip of foul-weathered coastland buffered by mountains to the east and the ocean to the west, they christened a town Eureka with the thought that by doing so they would ensure an underground store of vast, easily tapped gold reserves. They were wrong. There was nothing to extract from Eureka but dirt. The women were bewildered and the men heartbroken as they set down their tools and felt the infinity of worthless soil beneath them. So many dreams lost and no one to blame but their mistaken expectations.
Lacking money to return to the homes they’d been eager to leave just months before, they stayed and became fishermen and lumberjacks, exiles from their imaginary Eden, yoked to heavy labor. And although they eventually made peace with misfortune, accepting their lot as a kind of divine judgment, some later said that discovering no gold was a disappointment from which the town never recovered.
Nearly ten years after Leon Meed stopped writing in his journal, at the end of November, his dead body and a collection of nine burl statues were found in a cabin on Neeland Hill by a teenage boy who’d gotten lost while hiking. According to the story that ran in the Times-Standard, Leon had long been considered permanently missing by the police, though his body was in a fresh stage of decomposition suggesting that he’d died only recently. It was unknown whether he had lived incognito in the woods the whole time or just returned from someplace else, although a lawyer, Mr. Rasmussen, said he’d drawn up a will for Leon two weeks before. The newspaper story, despite a number of lurid quotes about the “corpse” from the boy who’d discovered it, was buried on page eight.
Of the people to whom Leon’s death would be important, only one had no earthly access to the story. Silas Carlton had suffered a heart attack four years earlier and passed away in his sleep. A loving half-page obituary written by his great-niece Lillith Fielding followed in the paper, after which three hundred people attended his funeral, a record for the hosting church.
Shane Larson didn’t read the article about Leon’s death because he was at that time living in Provo, Utah. On the morning it appeared he woke up with a walleyed hangover in a two-bedroom condominium beside his wife, Lenora, whom he had once begged not to leave him and promised that his lapses from Mormon propriety would stop. Meaning he had plunged a knife into his own back. And given himself an ever fresh cause for regret that drove him to new heights of deceit and fraud and theft and betrayal with no other reward than distraction from his home life. He lay in bed then, unalterably flaccid, and wished Lenora would run away with a church elder or fall off the red cliffs of Mt. Zion. Release him. Quit being a deadweight in every way save the literal one. Shane had had enough.
In Eureka, Eve Sieber didn’t see the story about Leon because she didn’t read the paper. She was thirty-three years old and lived alone in a single-bedroom efficiency apartment on F Street decorated with Byzantine prints, wall rugs, and garlands of dried peppers and flowers given to her by the customers of Going Places, the travel supply shop where she’d been assistant manager since Bonanza 88 went bankrupt seven years earlier. As part of her professional skill set, she could tell you where to dance the tambu in Curaçao and which monasteries were most impressive in Moldova. Set down in Riga on a cloudy day, she could find the closest hospital and the cheapest hostel. Burundi was her briar patch. Oman was no scarier to her than Omaha. Yet if these places weren’t altogether foreign, neither were they immediately familiar. She’d never gone anywhere and so knew the world only by hearsay and report. No worse than Emily Dickinson. On Tuesday afternoons she volunteered as a big sister at the YWCA. On Wednesday nights and Sundays she went to the Sacred Heart Church on H Street. On other days she worked and gardened and ran and did collage art and saw friends. Although she lacked for nothing, sometimes in the middle of this or that activity her thoughts ran over the men who expressed romantic interest in her and whom she always turned down. Despite knowing that God’s love was the only kind she could count on, her imagination occasionally sprang ahead of her like a dog forgetting its leash, and she pictured dates and hand holding and babies and what it meant to be a woman three years shy of her sexual peak.
It was slow at the shop on the morning the Leon story ran, so Eve inventoried the travel guides, which that year were selling like books about male-female communication. Some winters everyone stayed at home to shop and watch movies; others they all went to Tutuila or Tierra del Fuego or the Guandong Province. Sometimes people threw themselves into the farthest-flung places of the earth and it was a widely felt need for growth. When she finished with the books she moved with her neatly maintained pad of paper to the wall of cards.
The phone rang. “Going Places,” she said, rapidly counting cards with Indian photographs on the front, epic shots of flat-bellied children grabbing each other’s wrists in the Ganges as a nation in liquid floated by. Her nails were short and unpainted.
“Eve?” said Joon-sup, a friend she’d met while under the spell of Ryan’s death ten years ago. There were two more cards than there were envelopes. Customers were careless.
“Hi there,” answered Eve, fanning herself with the extra cards, wondering how to restore balance.
A loud tinkle sounded at the door. She glanced at a rough-hewn man who entered, wearing an oversized, badly patched army jacket with tarnished medals and peeling decorations. He had a minor bronchial fit—all catarrh and scorched larynx—and then ran his hands over the travel shaving kits, picked up an expensive titanium compass, and looked for the in-store camera. It was a failed lesson in the art of cunning.
“Is this an okay time to talk? Are you busy?”
Eve saw outside that it was drizzling and a fire truck screamed past. The compass was gone from its display shelf when the man moved to another part of the store. “Actually,” she lowered her voice, “now’s not so good.”
“Did you see the paper today?”
“The Chronicle?” She felt a twinge at the base of her back. Several months before, she had abandoned a calisthenics regimen because the pain around her upper sacrum was persisting. Perhaps she’d given up on the treatment too soon.
“In the Times-Standard there’s a story that I think—”
The army jacket now bulged with a satellite tracking device. “I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up and then going to lock the door and phone the police. Shoplifters, as a stark black-and-white sign next to the fire capacity warning on the back wall read, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.<
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After the thief’s complicated denials and her handing over the in-store video footage to the police, who led him away with some situational embarrassment, the store was again empty. Her back was a sharp message center. Her boss, Callie, wasn’t coming to relieve her for another two and a half hours, and she felt the want of an ice pack in the store.
Eve picked up the phone and dialed Joon-sup’s number. Then, while reaching down to pick up the trash behind the display counter, her lower back went into spasm for the second time in a year. Helplessly she fell to her knees, banged her head against the counter door, and then sat propped against the display-counter slide door, breathing heavily and feeling for blood on her scalp. The pain made her want to curl into a ball, but she didn’t budge other than to click off the phone while it was ringing. Next she called Callie to explain what had happened and then slowly, carefully escorted herself to the emergency room—her mind was a young lady and her body an elderly charge—where they gave her Valium and repeated what they’d told her the last time: lumbar muscle strains like hers took a week to heal. Her head was fine. The black male nurse named Prentiss who walked her to the exit and made sure she could drive home was especially nice, and he joked that she shouldn’t go bungee jumping or play tug-of-war anytime soon. “Cartwheels,” he said, assuming a grave expression, “now don’t even think about them.”
Five minutes after Eve promised not to think about cartwheels, Elaine Perry arrived home and picked up three letters from her mailbox. The first informed her that she’d been nominated for Humboldt County’s Teacher of the Year Award, which surprised her not out of false modesty but because Muir teachers were never nominated due to an anti-Muir bias among local educators. It was an enormous honor and made her head tingle so hard she massaged it with both hands.
The second letter was a note from her son Abraham with a health insurance form that needed her signature. Dear Mom, the note said, The semester is almost done and there are a million things I have to remember for finals. If only I hadn’t smoked so much pot in high school! Are we old enough to joke about that yet? I’m already choosing classes for next semester and am thinking marine biology, because it’s a good program here, and because I don’t know what I want to take. How’s Trevor and the canines? Is Mr. Lockjaw still being a prick about your creeping ivies “strangling” his junipers? Tell him he better watch out when I come home to visit. I’m taking judo lessons. Love, Abe.
She separated the insurance form from the letters, the third of which was in an unfamiliar hand and so got stuffed into her briefcase, and went inside the house, where an avalanche of unfolded clothes sat on the dryer, waiting to be set in motion. She peeked into Trevor’s room—empty—and went to her bedroom and lay down on Steve Baker’s running shorts and ankle weights. The cats had been at the bedspread again, pulling out loose threads that now resembled so many strands of angel hair pasta.
Were they old enough to joke about Abe’s obsession with marijuana? About it subsuming every interest Abe had ever had, so that if he wasn’t talking to his friends about gravity bongs or soil pH levels or the auxiliary benefits of being permanently stoned, he was in a stupor in front of the television? That hadn’t been anything to joke about; that had been a source of deep-welled worry, in which she’d explained to Abe the dangers of so much dreamtime, had read to him the section in The Odyssey about the Island of the Lotus-Eaters and how its inhabitants were too tranquilized to realize they were drowning when it sank into the sea. She’d initiated a battle for his soul, in which he’d been a reluctant ally and frequent turncoat, and for a time all had appeared to be lost. But then it got better. Abe grew out of it. Lost his drug paraphernalia and didn’t replace it. Sold the last of the dope he’d grown himself. Read a book. Elaine thought that some problems solved themselves, and a reflected patch of sunlight on the ceiling grew suddenly bright.
Steve would be home soon, her husband of seven years and the former colleague of her former husband, Greg. She thought about a stir-fry vegetable medley for dinner. Checked the couscous level and the time, four fourteen, and tossed vegetables into a colander in the kitchen sink. She put on folk-tinged music in which there was a love habit that couldn’t be broken—a denim voice crooned, “Don’t know why I relate to every gap-toothed man named Nate”—and went into the living room to water the plants. Then the front door slammed and Steve entered the house wearing a stethoscope on his temples like alien tentacles because, surprise, he was home early, got a couple of afternoon cancellations, and he was taking her to dinner at the Smile of Siam—and the vegetables I’ve already started washing? A little bath never hurt a legume, they could go back in the fridge—and voilà he was dragging her half-protestingly to the car. I need to change! No, you look great. But it’s only four twenty-five! So we’ll have time to walk around Old Town. They squealed out of the driveway and onto the road. He smiled at her and it was amazing to know that love needn’t die, that after years it was still capable of surprise and passion. Not always, she knew, but sometimes. And often sometimes was enough.
They parked on Second Street and walked along a boardwalk made of concrete-reinforced wood pulp with their arms around each other’s waists, and Elaine tried to match her stride with Steve’s. She always tried and never managed this—they remained a half-step off—which was slightly uncomfortable, like walking with a limp. Steve never noticed; he was too busy commenting on the Pacific black brants flying overhead or whistling Dvořák or recounting some droll surgery story. Elaine, rather than saying anything, thought, The more I hear Dvořák, the more I like him.
At five o’clock they turned around to limp toward the Smile of Siam. The cold sun set to the west, casting a row of four-story Victorian buildings as fairy-tale silhouettes. There was a feeling of abrupt evening; streetlights came on and sounds broke with their sources. Cars slowed down, their drivers strained to see crossing pedestrians blending into the shades of dusk. Elaine and Steve walked past their parked car and around a small crowd of people examining the sandwich board menu of the Fricatash, which had been converted under new ownership into an ice-cream parlor. An untethered French poodle stood several feet away on three legs, and Elaine stopped to pet it. Steve drifted over to a nearby sidewalk bench and flipped through a copy of the Times-Standard stuffed between its boards, where he came upon and closely read a story of immediate significance to him.
Turning from the dog back to her husband, Elaine tried to remember the name of the Dvořák piece and would have asked Steve if he hadn’t begun making the throat-clearing noise he made when anxious. She approached him and motioned for them to continue walking to the restaurant.
“Is something the matter?” she asked.
“It’s nothing.”
“What’s nothing?”
“Nothing’s nothing. I just saw in the newspaper that they’re going to tear down the old Bistrins building.”
“Good, it’s been empty forever. Will anything replace it?”
“Don’t know. I only read the headline.”
Elaine placed her arm around Steve’s waist and expected him to drop the dark prophet act and return to the semiromantic mood he’d been in before. His arms stayed unresponsively at his sides. “I have something to tell you,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I can’t say until dinner. It’s a surprise.” She waited for him to press the question, and when he didn’t she said, “You’re not going to have the curry, are you?”
“Maybe.”
“But what about the diarrhea—you told me last time to make sure you never got it again.”
Steve didn’t answer but kept clearing his throat. When they reached the restaurant Elaine opened the door and he entered wordlessly. After they sat down she batted her eyelashes at him as the mock southern belle she did sometimes to amuse him, but he didn’t notice, and then she ordered the pad thai and he the chicken curry. She broke apart her chopsticks and laughed when instead of dividing evenly down the middle, one snapped
in half. Steve drank his water quickly and asked to have hers.
“Why are you being so solemn?” she asked.
“I’m not. What are you going to tell me?”
“It’s not bad so don’t make that face. In fact, it’s good. I’ve been nominated for Humboldt County’s Teacher of the Year Award. Only three people are in the running, so I have a thirty-three-and-a-third chance of winning.”
“What does that mean?”
“If I win I’ll be up for the state award, meaning I’d go to Sacramento for a year to work with the state superintendent of schools office. I’d have a hand in crafting statewide curricula and see how the administration operates from the inside.”
“You’d live in Sacramento?”
“Just for a year.”
“Oh.” Steve settled back in his chair. It had been forever since he’d gone overboard with prescription speed, since that afternoon ten years earlier when he came home, as pale and thin as an Edward Gorey butler, and found his medicine cabinet cleaned out with an ominous note telling him never to use drugs again, and then discovered a battered Leon Meed reposing in the living room like he’d been invited on a social call, and then watched as Leon ceased to be there. “Sacramento—that’s seven hours away.”
“Which isn’t too far,” Elaine said. “I’d come back some weekends, and you could go there.”
“You’re going to be really busy.”
“I’m not going to get it. I’ve only been nominated. Even if I won here I’d have an impossible chance of winning the whole state.”
Their waiter, a teenage boy wearing enormous triangular glasses and a gold medallion depicting an entwined eagle and cobra, refilled their water and set down a pot of tea. The kitchen was temporarily out of the glass noodles used in pad thai, but could he recommend pan-fried soba noodles instead?
“Sure,” said Elaine. Then to Steve, “Why aren’t you happy for me? Why don’t you congratulate me?”