by Josh Emmons
“Its hidden world? What’s that?”
“A place called the Astral Plane, where spirits and magical creatures live.”
Barry said, a nasty tone rising in his voice that he didn’t try to suppress, “A phrase like ‘magical creatures’ is likely to make people laugh. How do you get anyone to take Wicca seriously?”
“I don’t know why magical creatures are funnier than angels or the devil.”
“Do you believe in magic?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever worked magic yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“Lots of things. I’ve cured friends who were sick. I’ve helped to bring about rain when forests were dying.”
“That happens even without magic.”
Lillith was frustrated for a moment and the silence frightened her, all those listeners out there stopping to hear how or if she’d answer. She said, “I’ve brought someone back from the Astral Plane.”
“You’ve what?”
“There once was a man named Leon Meed stuck on the Astral Plane, and I brought him back to our world.”
“Why, so you could kill him?”
Lillith opened her mouth to answer but lost the words before she could pronounce them.
Barry continued, “The paper didn’t say how he died, so if this is a confession I’ll have to detain you until the police arrive.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lillith had been told this would be a friendly chat about Wiccan events and resources in northern California. A chance to enlighten and educate. She was organizing a three-day retreat at Wolf Creek in two weeks and this was to be an opportunity to promote it. “It’ll be like an infomercial,” Barry had told her over the phone. Instead it had taken an inquisitorial, sadistic turn. She didn’t know where the hostility was coming from.
“My guest today on Live from Somewhere is Lillith Fielding, a local neopagan activist and organizer. We’ll be right back after a word from our underwriters and the community announcements that matter.” Barry flipped a switch and the on-air sign turned red. Rubbed his temples with his forefingers. “This is going well. I like the Leon Meed angle. You’re doing an improv thing now, a free association. It’s working.”
“You know who Leon Meed is?”
“Weren’t you here when I read my news summary?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you heard me read the article about him from the paper.”
“What article?”
“Don’t play dumb when we go back on the air.” He lifted and moved stacks of folders and miscellaneous papers. “Here.” He handed her the Times-Standard from the day before. “Let’s keep going with it. I think we’ve exhausted the Wicca stuff.”
Lillith, touching her forehead with her left hand as though feeling for an abrasion, stood up, collected her purse and sweater, and opened the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“But you’re doing great. There’s no need to be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous. I’m upset that you’re acting like a shock jock out to attack everything I say. This whole thing is biased and cynical, and I don’t have time to be publicly mauled like this. It’s not worth it. I thought this show was going to be different.”
Barry followed her into the hallway of the Van Duzen Building, where students passed by in herds and there were bulletin boards listing tai chi classes and emergency environmental interventions and guru appearances. “I’m only trying to make it interesting!”
Lillith walked out the double doors, which closed behind her and were immediately opened by another wave of entering and exiting students. Barry then returned to the broadcast room, where he had to go back on the air too quickly to think of a good excuse why his guest was gone. Therefore he used a bad excuse; he said that Lillith had gotten sick and was throwing up and couldn’t return to the show.
He played music and read everything in the read box, and when his time slot finally ended he handed the microphone over to Trey Pallance, a tragically straight undergraduate who always camped it up around Barry, in solidarity perhaps, and went outside to begin hating himself. Passing through the games of Frisbee and hacky sack and drum circles and solitary readers and hoarse evangelists, he went over in his head what had happened. He unlocked his mud-splattered Honda and drove to a fast-food place and got a hamburger, remembering the betrayed look on Lillith’s face during the interview, as if she were a lamb led to slaughter. Barry asked himself, So am I the butcher? He came to a stoplight. He took a shark bite of burger. In the car to his right was a nancy boy to whom he could have given the Signal—pointed to his watch and flashed five fingers signifying I can get you off in five minutes, an admittedly simple signal because after all gay men weren’t the Masons—and been a quick top or bottom in the nearest public bathroom. He could have amused himself the way he did whenever he felt bad about being a bitch: by cruising or watching television or opening a bottle of this or that. It was like, once upon a time he’d been a sweet boy, a painfully shy child effeminate enough to make a hundred male poets grateful that the world was minting their successors, and he’d blushed whenever he was the center of attention, so that in seventh grade one of his classmates had said, “Hey, everyone look at Barry,” and he’d gone bright red on command as twenty-three twelve-year-olds laughed like wind chimes in a hurricane. He’d been homo sensitivus. He’d had a porcelain heart. But now Barry was unfazed as the center of attention, sexual or otherwise, and perhaps this brazenness was merely a by-product of growing up and developing the calluses necessary to survive. Staying as tender-skinned as he’d been as a child would have killed him. But was his adult personality an improvement? Built on confrontations and an acerbic wit that could eat through steel? That waited like a tyger tyger burning bright for somebody, anybody to express genuine sentiment? The man in the car to his right pointed to his watch and held up five fingers. Barry floored it as the light went green.
That evening Steve was called in to surgery and didn’t finish until three thirty a.m., at which time he and nursing assistant Prentiss Johnson were hungry and deliberating in front of a vending machine on the fourth floor. Steve held his money like a racetrack betting slip and watched the machine as though it were a closed-circuit broadcast of the race. Prentiss looked expectantly at him, waiting for his turn to slide in money. Both wore scrubs and hair caps and form-fitting slippers.
“What, you getting a cream pie?” Prentiss asked, balancing on one leg as he pulled the other foot up to scratch his calf. “At this hour?”
“Especially at this hour,” Steve answered, feeding dollar bills into the slot. “Cream pies are manna from heaven.”
“Those things’ll kill you. It’s not doctors who eat healthy. It’s us nurses. We’re the ones who’re going to live forever. Med school was wasted on you all. Step aside.” Prentiss got a nonfat yogurt, a bag of raisins, and a guava juice, and then they went to sit on the overstuffed houndstooth couch in the doctors’ lounge, a pan flute rendition of “Acrid Avid Jam Shred” playing in the background.
Soon after he’d been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning the third and final time, ten years ago, Prentiss enrolled at the local junior college and then got his nursing degree at UC Riverside. Three years later he returned to Humboldt County and was sober except for two largely uneventful occasions (a night of utter loneliness and a chance encounter with his old AA sponsor Alvin, who had just broken up with Barry Klein again and was feeling low). He now lived two blocks from the hospital on Evergreen Street and kept a house pig named Ferdinand—pigs were his favorite animal—and he’d made a set of friends for whom alcohol was a minor concern. In Riverside he had gone out with a woman and it had gotten serious, but then she moved to Georgia for her job and that was the end of that. He hadn’t dated anyone in years and had recently placed an ad in the personals section of the Times-Standard.
“What do you think the v
ote’s going to be on the highway rerouting?” Prentiss asked, pointing to the front page of the paper announcing the March county referendum.
“It’ll pass,” said Steve. “People hate that the 101 goes through Eureka. They’ve always hated it and this is one of the last towns that doesn’t have a bypass.”
“But Eureka needs the highway to survive. Look at Cloverdale and what a noplace it’s been since they built the bypass. We’ve got to force people to drive through town. It’s self-preservation says that, and anyone who votes against it is against Eureka. Might as well declare this place a ghost town and get put on the historical interest map, make the tourist dollars that way.”
“Eureka will survive. It has a lot going for it.”
“Name five things it’s got going for it.”
“Five—that’s unfair.”
“We cut Eureka loose from the highway and there’s no reason to stop here for your average traveler. The 101 passing through it is an incentive to see the city. I’m telling you, it’s all a web with everything connected to everything. Without the highway there’s less jobs, means people move away, less sick people, less funding for the hospital, you’re out of a job, I’m out of a job. It’s already bad enough I can’t meet a single woman over the age of twenty around here.”
“The real reason you’re upset.”
“No, it’s the interconnectedness I’m talking about. The preservation.”
They waved good night to a doctor who saluted as he passed by the open door. They fixed themselves cups of complimentary coffee. Prentiss was nonplussed that his favorite sweetener was gone and vainly rooted around in the supply cabinets, overturning stacks of plastic lids and boxes of figure-eight straws. “Why’re you still here, anyway? What’s your wife think about you not rushing home to her after a hard night’s work?”
“She’s asleep. Tomorrow’s a school day, so I might as well stay till she wakes up.”
They sat back down and were stirring their coffee and taking unpleasurable sips and letting their minds and bodies unwind, when Prentiss said, rubbing his lamb’s wool beard, “Your hands ever rash up from surgical gloves? I’m thinking I have an allergy to the petrochemicals.”
“Hmm. I’d love another cream pie.”
“I can’t believe they even sell those fatty things in a hospital. You see they took out the cigarette machines years ago and then the healthy improvements just stopped. Like it’s okay to have the blood pressure of a sumo wrestler so long as you don’t get lung cancer.”
Steve meditated on the steam belly-dancing out of his coffee cup, and his lips moved silently. He swiped off his cap and placed it on his knee. “You lived in Eureka before you got your nursing degree, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember a missing person story from ten years ago, guy named Leon Meed?”
Prentiss squinted and stared into space and from fatigue his eyes were red and watery. “Yes.”
“It was in the papers for a while.”
“Then it popped up in yesterday’s, about him dying. Why you asking?”
Steve tightened the corners of his mouth and studied his friend. Hospitals hummed, and if you were silent long enough, the humming sounded like screaming. “No reason.”
“As if I’d believe that.” Another meditative silence rose into an uproar and Prentiss said, “You know how I’ve never asked if Elaine had any single women friends?”
“Yeah.”
“What if I asked now if maybe she knows a teacher or some other type of unattached woman from the education field. I could—”
A distant yet clear voice paged Dr. Baker over the loudspeakers. Would he please come to ER right away? Steve stood up and threw away his quarter-full cup of coffee and said, “She might. Right now isn’t the best time for me to find out—we’re having issues—but I’ll ask as soon as I can.”
“No pressure,” said Prentiss. “Just if she happened to know someone who wanted to be set up on a date, I’d be interested. That kind of thing.”
“You got it.”
“And don’t stay here too late. I want you home when your wife wakes up.”
Steve shrugged and left the room.
2
What Shane Larson liked most about Eureka was its lack of bullshit. You walked into a store there, a grocery store, say, and nobody told you about the day’s specials or asked if you were finding everything okay. There wasn’t the automatic assumption that you were a fucking retard. Similarly, when someone bought a funeral plot in Eureka, they listened to your pitch and then said yes or no. Sans bullshit. Elsewhere—such as in Provo—they tried to lowball you or sneak around you to talk to the manager and insist that they get prime placement—a Lily of the Valley spot, or one in Ivy Grove—for standard placement price, thus robbing you of a commission and getting you in trouble for being inflexible. It was wrong and it was bullshit. So that after a while you reached a point where Provo could shove its lowballing so-called Mormons up its ass, a threshold where you were ready to leave, no questions asked, no answers given, just hop on the bus and get yourself free.
Having crossed this threshold the week before, Shane found himself back in Eureka on the evening of December 6, staring at the yellow wall-papered innards of the studio apartment in Henderson Center he’d secured before leaving Provo. Lenora hadn’t tried to stop him from going, and he wondered now why he hadn’t done it sooner. All this time he’d thought she would go crazy if he left her. All this time he had lived a constrained life for no reason. Estrangement. A new word for a new beginning. The next day he would call his old boss at Morland Memorial Services and talk about resuming work for the company. Do a little fence-mending. Apologize again for the shit that had gone down when he’d quit ten years before (the files he’d recklessly erased, the contracts he’d lost, the petty sabotage). Prepare to reenter Eureka society with his tail out from between his legs.
It was with pleasant thoughts like these that Shane sat on a lawn chair in the middle of his nearly empty apartment, a suitcase of Bud Light propped open by his side, enjoying a vigorous handjob, when his phone rang.
“Yeah,” he said, flipping the phone open and staring with old curiosity at his swollen cock.
“Shane Larson?”
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Martin Nemec, and I write for the Times-Standard. I’d like to talk to you if you have a minute.”
“About what?”
“Do you know a man named Leon Meed?”
As though by command, Shane’s erection began to fall. “I remember the name.”
“Were you aware that he was found dead recently?”
“No, but I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Yes—”
“Have his funeral arrangements been made?”
“I—don’t know. I wrote a story about his death in last week’s paper, and since then I’ve become interested in what happened to him. Maybe you know that he was a burl sculptor.”
“If you’re not handling the burial, any idea who is? Widow? Kids?” Shane’s cock reversed its course to upright. Stiffs made him stiff. He looked around for a pen and paper but of course there was nothing and wasn’t it typical that business would fall into his lap when he wasn’t prepared for it.
“I think his body is being interred at the morgue, and as far as I know he’s not survived by anybody. But if you’ll give me a second, I want to say that I’ve gained access to Leon’s possessions, the things impounded by the police from his home, and I’ve read his journal, which is an interesting document. You’re the last person mentioned in it.”
Shane’s dick again reversed direction, contracting with snail-like temerity.
“The journal suggests that Leon had a mental illness of some kind, and I’m wondering if you could tell me about your encounters with him.”
“My encounters? I barely knew him. We didn’t really have any what you’d call encounters.”
“He wrote that you attacked him once and tri
ed to take him to the police in order to collect a ten-thousand-dollar reward his mother had offered for his return.”
Shane stood up, zipped his pants, and looked out his window, half expecting to see a stalker sitting on the curb across the street, staring up at him. All he saw was his own reflection. “What is this?”
“I’m not—”
“I just tried to do my civic duty by turning in a guy who’d gone missing, and I’ll testify to that in court. You hear me?” Shane turned around and walked back and forth in his room, stepping over the beers and his half-unpacked bags.
“I’m not trying to threaten you. I would—”
“I don’t give a fuck what you’re trying to do. That journal doesn’t prove a goddamned thing.”
“I know. It only shows that Leon was mentally unstable. That’s what I’m saying. For example, he wrote that he got away from you, specifically that he got out of your car one night, by disappearing into thin air. I have no intention of opening a case against you. On the contrary, I’m interested in how Leon’s disease afflicted him.”
Shane didn’t say anything.
“Whatever it was, it made him think he was being miraculously transported all over Humboldt County. You’re one of about ten people he names who saw that happen.”
“Is that right?”
“I’m planning to write a human interest story about Leon, about a man whose wife and daughter drowned in a tragic boating accident, and who then gradually lost his capacity for reason until, on the tenth anniversary of their death, he lost his wits altogether and began to believe that he was literally disappearing. This could be a very big story for me; it could make my career. So what I’d like is for you to give me your impressions of Leon and tell me what actually happened when you were with him. You could describe what it was like to see a man unhinged by grief, someone who had fallen out of touch with reality.”
Shane sat back down on his chair and cracked open a fresh beer. After a long, burning sip, he belched and said, “I hate to disappoint you, scoop, but I can’t do that.”