by Josh Emmons
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. That was extremely heartfelt.”
“I don’t feel well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Steve, I’m not going anywhere. I probably won’t win. It’s just nice to be nominated, you know? It’s nice to be acknowledged for what I do.”
“I’m happy for you.”
Steve poured tea into their cups. Finding his pills gone ten years ago he’d sat on the toilet seat with his head in his hands; his wife had already left him and he’d had nothing to prop him up. There hadn’t even been enough aspirins in the house to end it all. He’d stood up in the bathroom and felt for his car keys and on his way to the door run smack into Leon. “Anything else happen today?” he said.
“I got a letter from Abe. He said he’s having a hard time memorizing for his finals and asked if we could joke about his pot habit yet. As if it’s been years since the crisis time and he’s completely out of the woods.”
“It’s been a while.”
“It’s not even been five months.”
“I don’t think he’ll backslide.”
“Remember the parents’ meetings we went to that were all about how easy it is to relapse? That addicts are always at risk? I never would have thought he had an addictive personality when he was a boy, but—”
“Not everyone who quits using drugs is susceptible to relapse.”
“But we can’t assume that Abe is one of the unsusceptible ones.”
“He’s not the type to have a problem with drugs all his life. He’s got too much going on in his head.”
“Smart people are destroyed by drugs all the time.”
“Abe’s like me. He’ll be able to walk away and not look back.”
“What do you know about walking away from drugs?”
“I know.”
“How?”
“I used to take uppers when Anne and I split up.”
“Uppers?”
“Speed.”
“You were on speed!” She lowered her voice too late.
“Yes.”
“Are you serious?” She looked around to see what kind of impact her voice had had on the room’s other occupants. “I didn’t know that. Why haven’t you ever told me?”
“There wasn’t a right time. When we first got together you’d just seen that kid die of an overdose, and then my own problem began to seem unimportant. It became a phase I’d gone through.” He stared at her levelly and drank everything on the table.
“I don’t know how to respond,” she said. “During all the worry and confusion about Abe you never said a word.”
“Are you angry?”
“I don’t know about angry. I can’t say I’m angry exactly; it’s more like I’m shocked. This is a huge thing to keep from me all these years.”
“I wasn’t doing well then. The divorce was so painful I can’t explain it.”
“We’ve had a million conversations about your divorce.”
“It was just one detail I left out.”
“What made you quit?”
He looked at her and rubbed his chin.
“Did you quit?”
“Yes. I just told you it was easy to stop.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“I’ve said all there is to say.”
“You haven’t said anything except that your divorce was hard—which I already knew—and that you were addicted to amphetamines. Why won’t you tell me why you quit?”
“Thank you,” said Steve to the waiter, who placed a full water pitcher and their plates in front of them. The waiter went to the door and returned to seat an old woman at the table next to them.
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Steve said.
“Yes, you do, or I wouldn’t have to keep asking.”
Steve stirred the small pieces of chicken on his plate, sure that Elaine would move to Sacramento. He’d once known that the permanence of happiness was illusory; why had he forgotten it? Anne remarried around the time he did—seven years ago—which meant she’d been with her current husband for four years longer than she’d been with him. He was incapable of sustaining love. He looked at Elaine; she already appeared far away, as if he were remembering her face instead of seeing it directly.
“Is your food okay?” asked the waiter, standing near the cash register wiping down menus.
“Fine,” said Steve. Then to Elaine, “It’s going to be immediately clear why I don’t want to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I wish you’d let it go.”
“And I wish you’d come out with it. I thought we told each other everything. You’ve always said that you prized our openness more than anything, and now I’m hearing this.”
“I quit because I saw a former patient of mine disappear.”
She frowned and made a face like she was trying to locate a hair in her mouth with her tongue. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“I saw a man named Leon Meed go from being in the room with me to not being in the room with me in the space of a second.”
“Leon Meed?”
“Yes.”
“He was the man I thought was helping Greg blackmail me.”
“Yes.”
“But it turned out he’d gone missing and the police were looking for him.”
“Yes. There’s an article in today’s paper saying he just died.”
“And you saw him do what?”
“You won’t believe it so let’s not discuss it anymore, but what happened was he visited me a couple of times and threw away my pills and warned me not to do them anymore. Then he magically vanished into thin air.”
She shook her head quizzically. “You mean you thought he vanished because you were on drugs.”
“No, I saw him disappear.”
“Steve, you didn’t.”
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Why are you lying about this?”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t understand. You come home in the best mood I’ve ever seen you in, and then suddenly you used to be a drug addict and you saw a man disappear ten years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” Steve grabbed the bill and went to the counter, followed by the waiter trying to tell him that he’d take care of it and Steve didn’t need to get up.
What’s going on? Elaine thought, reaching for her water glass without realizing it was empty. What is going on?
The next morning, Sadie Jorgenson woke up and forced herself to walk the plank of showering, dressing, and going to work, where there were twenty-nine messages on her phone service that she didn’t have the energy to listen to. In her office she smeared peanut butter on vegetable crackers and ate methodically, great mouthfuls of instant paste. She wore a loose polyester blouse and a cotton skirt and freshly resoled clogs, the cork on the bottom of which she dug at with a penknife while waiting for the day to begin.
Her first patient was a teenage boy named Peter whose parents sent him to her because at night he went around the house breaking appliances—clocks, televisions, computers, microwaves, refrigerators—as would, in their words, “a sinister elf.” During his opening sessions with Sadie he’d said that his family was too materialistic, and that he was showing them the error of their ways. When she suggested that boredom was the real cause of his vandalism, and that he might want to take up a hobby, something physical that would tire him out by the time he went to bed so he could go right to sleep, he said she was a terrible therapist. Sadie took the insult well—she agreed with him in her heart—and got through the session on autopilot. Her next patient that morning was a first-timer who claimed that everyone disliked her, even strangers. Even Sadie. When Sadie said that this wasn’t true, that most people didn’t like or dislike someone without knowing them first, the woman responded by saying
that Sadie was just trying to make her feel better. Sadie couldn’t deny it, and when the hour was up she flipped through a gardening magazine and was herself bored.
At twelve thirty she knocked on her colleague Bob’s door and suggested they go to Amigas Burrito. She had to get out of the office right away. Bob was reading dictation into his computer and paused in mid-sentence, his shoulders hunched over the keyboard like a cresting wave. “Don’t you have a one o’clock?” he asked.
“I canceled them, Bob.”
“Why?”
“I’m too hungry to listen.”
“I thought the problem is that they don’t talk.”
“Have I discussed them with you? Am I that unprofessional?”
“We discuss them every week.”
“Get your coat, Bob. It’s raining.”
They took Sadie’s station wagon, which was long and wide and had wainscoted doors. They had an asexual relationship, but not for lack of trying—they’d dated nine years earlier until Bob admitted, unsolicited, that his antidepressant made him impotent, at which point they downshifted to friends—and now ate together regularly, dueting on love songs to and from restaurants.
“You know,” said Bob, “I’m not sure I’m in the mood for Mexican.”
“Yes, you are.” Sadie honked at an old woman in the crosswalk in front of them who’d dropped her purse and was kicking it slowly to the curb. “Can you believe this lady? If you ever see me doing that, run over me.”
Bob removed his glasses and wiped them with his undershirt. “If I said you cancel patient appointments a lot these days, would you get defensive?”
“I don’t do it a lot.”
“So that’s your answer.”
“Today’s couple is doomed, and the three of us know it. She wants kids, he doesn’t, and nothing anyone says will change that. By canceling our session I’m saving them money, which they need because when they break up one of them will have to find a new place to live and that’s a lot of outlay to set up electricity, water, etcetera.”
“I’d rather hear about their sexual foibles than their money troubles.”
“That’s because you’re a pervert, Bob.”
“Didn’t you tell me this guy was on the fence about kids, that he might want to have them someday?”
“He only says that as a stall. He’s not going to want kids. At least not with her.”
“Why do you think that?”
“There’s no love in the room during their sessions. I arrange the chairs beforehand so that their arms are touching each other, and when he comes in he moves them apart. Without even thinking. And not just a little so that he’ll have more leg space; he actually lifts up his chair and sets it down two feet away.”
“Does she notice?”
“No. She’s getting out her tissue to tear into a million pieces so that I have to vacuum up after they leave.” There was nothing good on the radio. Sadie switched it off. “Sometimes I think it’d be better to work in a hospital with the truly ill, like you did before you went into private practice.”
“You don’t want to do that; it’s demoralizing. In the three years I worked at Kimbote Psychiatric, I never helped anyone into release. Not once. Take the feeling you have now of not making a difference and multiply that by a hundred if you want to know what it’s like.”
At Amigas Burrito they went inside and ordered numbered specials with colored rice and refried beans. The walls were painted a three-dimensional San Cristóbal zócalo. Sadie was substantially heavier than she’d been ten years earlier. She loved carbohydrates purely and unconditionally. Bob looked slight and effeminate next to her. There were free drink refills; his was diet and hers was vanilla flavored.
Sadie said, “I’m burned out. I see seven people a day, and most of them have been coming for years. Do you know what I think, Bob?”
“No. And I’d like to point out again how much you say my name.”
“People don’t want to overcome their neuroses; they just want someone to listen to them. They don’t want health; they want an audience.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Couples only come to me when they’ve been sleeping in separate beds for months, and then all I can do is ease them into divorce or splitting up. I’m tired of being the emcee of broken relationships. There is no hope for anyone.”
Bob placed a small hand on Sadie’s. “Maybe you should take a sabbatical for a while, until you feel like yourself again.”
“I feel like myself. That’s the problem.”
“Everyone gets tired of their job. They forget why they went into their profession. You’ve got to remember the story of the two men on the beach.”
“With the starfish?”
“Yes.”
“I hate that story.”
“Two men are walking on a beach. The first picks up a starfish to throw into the ocean. The second says, ‘What difference does that make when there are hundreds of starfish on the beach?’ The first man answers, ‘It makes a difference to this one.’”
“I still hate that story. Besides, I throw a starfish toward the water and it ends up in the dunes behind me.”
“That’s not always true.”
“Nothing’s always true.”
Bob chewed and swallowed and said, “True.”
Sadie appreciated Bob’s wanting to help but marveled at his ineffectiveness. She was living proof of her point that no one could be helped, that we would live with our problems until death do us part. More certain than any marriage. And when she pushed back her chair to stand she knocked off a stack of newspaper sections from another table. She looked at the mess on the ground, and facing up was a picture and article about a man who had gone missing ten years before and recently been found dead in the woods. Sadie read it all in a ten-second gulp.
“Bob,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Bob, I need you to drive on the way back.”
Across town where she worked as a secretary at Steve’s office, the Coastal Orthopedic Medical Group, Lillith Fielding prepared to leave early. She raced through two short stacks of filing, sorted out a confused box of sample painkillers, and searched for a misplaced invoice. Then she told her coworkers that she was on her way to Humboldt State University for her radio appearance. They wished her luck and said they’d tune in, which made her nervous even though she’d known them forever and didn’t need to impress them, and they all respected her neopaganism for what it was, or at least they didn’t say anything critical to her about it. The trick to being on the radio was not to think about the people listening, the way you weren’t supposed to look down while climbing a ladder.
The man who was going to interview her, Barry Klein, had warned her that the KHSU station control room would give a worm claustrophobia, and it was easy to take the joke seriously when she arrived to be a guest on his show, Live from Somewhere, sitting thigh to thigh beside him and talking into the small microphone that grew out of a busy gray console like an iron thistle. She was there to discuss the North Coast’s rapidly expanding neopagan community and had met Barry a year earlier at Club Triangle, the gay-themed night at downtown Eureka’s East & West Club, where she’d accompanied her friend Franklin, whom Barry later went home with. Barry had called her a month ago saying he’d found her name on the Internet as a neopagan spokesperson and wanted her to be on his show.
The on-air light turned green after a few service announcements and sponsor acknowledgments, and Barry said, leaning back in his chair to make Lillith feel more comfortable, because she was evidently nervous, quaffing breath mints, “Now I’d like to welcome listeners to Live from Somewhere. This week we have as our guest Lillith Fielding, a local organizer of Wiccan and other neopagan events, to discuss her faith and its increasing importance in this area. Thanks for being here, Lillith.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
“First of all, you’re a witch.”
“Yes.”
“Is the
re a reason you call yourself that, considering the word’s negative connotations? Are you reclaiming it the way gays did with queer? Or blacks did with nigger?” Barry didn’t even try to cross his legs in this small space; he knew what a tangle of wires and cords that would create in addition to inconveniencing his guest.
“No, it’s what we Wiccans have always called ourselves.” Lillith articulated every word like a speech coach and sweat gathered on her forehead. Her throat was dry. She fished about in her purse for a half-liter bottle of water and took a silent sip.
“How long are we talking here? That is, how long have Wiccans been around?”
“We trace our tradition back thirty-five thousand years, to the first nature-worshipping peoples of central Europe.”
Barry nodded and folded his hands, pure encouragement. “This brings up an interesting point. Some people claim that Wicca really dates back only to 1950, when Gerald Gardner wrote Witchcraft Today, an alleged history and explanation of underground pagan sects in England that’s been proven to be made up. Practices that Gardner claimed had been in place for millennia are no more legitimate than the Mormon Book of Abraham. How do you answer these charges?”
Lillith’s eyes flickered for a moment. “Every religion has detractors who deny it tenet by tenet. Christians and Jews have atheists telling them they’re living a lie. Buddhists and Hindus have Christians and Jews telling them the same thing. It comes down to a question of faith. Either you believe in the spiritual validity of Wicca or you don’t. It does a lot of people good and that alone is reason to support it even if you’re not Wiccan. It’s empowering for young women, for example—actually, for women of all ages—because it says that the grand creative force in the universe is feminine, the Goddess.”
“You’re talking about belief and how you either believe or you don’t. Most Christians and Jews would say they believe because of the Bible, or because they have a relationship with God. Why do you believe in Wicca?”
Lillith sat up straight in her chair. “Because it speaks to me. And because I believe in the sanctity of nature, which according to Wicca is the seat of all goodness in the universe. Nature provides for us while we’re alive in every way—it gives us food and medicine and beauty—and then welcomes us into its hidden world when we die.”