by Josh Emmons
Steve drove through the rural hinterland of Eureka, past pastures of moonlit cows, on a two-lane road going fifty-five miles an hour. The Nutcracker Suite danced out of his stereo. In the distance a car rounded a bend and came toward him with its high beams on. He flashed his own to alert the other driver, but the lights stayed high and became more excruciatingly bright with each second. Then it passed him. The driver of the other car was probably drunk or insane or both, and he imagined he’d be called in later that evening to stitch together whatever was left of him after the inevitable accident. It was all a big déjà vu.
When his cell phone rang he answered it.
“Steve,” said Prentiss. “It’s me. What’re you doing?”
“Driving.”
“Where to?”
“I’m on Elk River Road.”
“To get down to it, I’m feeling a little on edge like it might be nice to get out of the house for a while and meet up with you someplace. Have a juice.”
“I’m in the middle of introspective time right now.”
“I hear you. All right, then. Good night.”
“You’re not wanting to drink, are you? Is this a reaching-out phone call?”
“No. It’s just I’m in a lonely mood and I’d like to meet somebody—a woman—and it’d be better if I was at a bar with a friend, you know, so I didn’t look desperate.”
“You don’t want that.”
“No.”
“Well, let me think. How about we meet at the Ritz?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Half an hour later Prentiss and Steve sat together at the Ritz. As part of the bar’s new safari-themed décor, a pith helmet and imitation leopard skin hung on the wall above their table next to a battered Winchester and a picture of wildebeests migrating across the Serengeti. At one end of the bar counter two butterfly nets crisscrossed, and at the other was a giant plastic fern. The room was dark and humid. The thematic effort ended there, however, and in most ways the bar looked and felt like it always had, its exhausted velvet lining a testament to the glamorous effect it had once striven for.
The two friends drank guava juice, Prentiss because that’s what he always drank and Steve because alcohol seemed then like an empty pleasure. The former wore a mahogany brushed-suede jacket and the latter a badly stained Humboldt State University sweatshirt. Prentiss’s hair was shiny and well combed, Steve’s was dull and wispy. Besides them, the bar was deserted.
“I’m sorry I didn’t change my clothes,” said Steve. “In this state I’m probably a liability to you with women.”
Prentiss waved his hand and knocked his napkin to the floor. “There’d have to be women here for that to be the case. I’m seeing that the Ritz isn’t the magnet it used to be, probably on account of this jungle environment.”
“Eureka doesn’t like kitsch.”
“Maybe we should try someplace else. The bars along Second Street. Or the Carter Hotel. I can’t feel good about keeping you from home if it’s just to sit here like this.”
“There’s nothing for me to go home to.”
“I seem to remember you having a wife.”
A pair of women came into the bar. One had dirty blond hair and the other was a brunette. Beyond that, Prentiss couldn’t make out anything specific because they moved quickly and at an inopportune angle to the counter, where they were blocked from view by the fern. Prentiss would have asked Steve, who was in a better position to see them, to relay his impression, but his friend said at that moment, “She’s going to leave me.”
Prentiss turned his attention from the hidden women. “Elaine? Why?”
“The main reason is that she’s up for a teaching award that will require her to move to Sacramento for a year, starting in the fall.”
“Wait a minute—this is a deep conversation all of a sudden. She’s moving? Without you? When did this happen?”
“Last week.”
“And you won’t go with her?”
“She hasn’t suggested it. She told me what the award means and that was pretty much the end of the conversation. We were out to dinner and as soon as she explained it she went on the attack and got argumentative. Like she had to start driving a wedge between us right away.”
“I’m sorry. You were just saying a few weeks ago how good things were between you. It was a high moment.”
“Yeah, but in the back of my mind I knew it couldn’t last.”
“Is she going soon?”
“I don’t know. I feel like if I confront her about it that might speed it up; she could feel pressed to split us up before Sacramento. Part of me, though, thinks that since it’s inevitable I should get it over with.”
The women who’d come in got their drinks and walked to a table; again Prentiss couldn’t see them clearly. They draped their coats over their chairs and sat down. The brunette adjusted the collar on her blouse, and the blonde crossed her legs and laid her hands flat on the table, as though about to hear her fortune read. A lion roared out of the bar’s music speakers with the announcement of a two-for-one drink special that would last no more or less than two minutes.
One of the women, Eve, said to the other, Justine, “I’m glad you called me. I’ve been friends with Joon-sup forever, and I know you don’t have a problem with that, but I’ve always wanted to meet you anyway. If I had a boyfriend I’d want to know his women friends at least by sight so that if we met on the street I could say hi.”
Justine smiled and held her head still, in agreement, and said, “I meant to do it sooner, and now it has to be under these circumstances.”
“Is something wrong? He didn’t look well today.”
Justine’s smile faded. “You saw him today?”
“At the food fair. He wanted to talk about—”
“About what?”
Eve faltered, “Soulbrother’s dance recital.”
“Oh. Well, I wish I knew how to prepare you for what I have to say. Or myself, even. So I’m just going to say it. Joon-sup has heart disease.”
“He does?”
“A month ago he saw a cardiologist for chest pains he’s been having, and his test results came back positive two weeks ago. Apparently he has a genetic disorder. The good news is that it’s at an early stage, and he could have years still.”
Eve set down the drink she’d been holding. It seemed to slide across the table without reaching the edge. She felt cold. Joon-sup, thirty-three, had heart disease. The face across from her was devoid of pleasantry and pretense, an expression more common in holy men and lunatics than in people you’d meet in a bar. Eve shivered and had nothing to draw around her shoulders. A Tarzan yell went up in the bar along with a message announcing that rum drinks were for a limited time only five dollars. Eve said, “Two weeks ago that’s when he stopped running with me.”
“He wants to keep it a secret. He thinks people would feel sorry for him and treat him differently if they knew, so as long as possible he’d like them not to know.”
“Of course.” Tribal drums thumped along behind chants that were meaningless in any language. “This is so sudden. I don’t know what to say it’s so sudden.”
Justine laid a hand on Eve’s too cold to help. “Joon-sup especially doesn’t want you to know, because your boyfriend died so young, but I’m telling you because I’d like you to watch out for him. You could stop him from doing anything that would get his blood pressure up or cause him too much excitement. The doctor said it’d be best if he stayed away from physically strenuous activities.”
“Of course, I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks. Joon-sup was right about you.”
“I haven’t even offered my condolences. This is so sudden. I remember losing Ryan; I know what you’re going through. This is a terrible, sudden thing.”
“Can I ask you for help in another way?”
Eve nodded dumbly.
“Joon-sup’s best friend from South Korea, Hyun-bae, lives in San Diego, which is where I’m from
. I think it might be good if we moved down there. The weather’s better, and my family is there. I suggested it to him and he doesn’t like the idea, but if he mentions it to you, would you say whatever good you can about southern California?”
Eve had known for a long time that what was given was taken away, that the greatest earthly folly lay in attachments to people, to places, to things. For these returned to dust. Only God could bear her absolute dependence. She knew this, but she also didn’t know. Joon-sup was too young to die. Everyone, regardless of his or her age, was too young. You couldn’t populate a world with creatures whose spiritual goal was to not need one another; it ran contrary to what Eve knew beyond scripture and enlightenment. Eve needed Joon-sup. She needed. And if she had to lose him—which she did, she’d been told—then she wouldn’t bury her feelings under the weight of its inevitability. She wouldn’t say that his absence was really evidence of his presence, because it wasn’t.
When pygmy chimps screamed a prelude to another drink special, the bartender shut off the sound system. Prentiss glanced at him approvingly and said, “I’m thinking that all is not lost for you. If you come up with a strategy for how you’d make your lives work together in Sacramento, it seems to me Elaine would listen. You got to fight for this. Tell her how much your marriage means to you.”
Steve shook his head. “Sacramento is just an excuse. She’d leave me for some other reason if not for this. Every woman I’ve ever been with has left me.”
“You and Elaine love each other.”
“My first wife, Anne, and I loved each other.”
“So what was it made her leave?”
“I don’t know.”
Prentiss gave Steve a scolding look. “I think you do know.”
“Anne left because I withdrew into myself when I felt the relationship going badly.”
“What’s that mean, you withdrew?”
“I figured that since I was going to be abandoned, I had to become strong on the inside and detach myself to make it hurt less.”
“So you’re saying she left you because you withdrew, but at the same time you withdrew because she was going to leave you. What came first?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me know when you figure it out.” They sat in silence for several minutes until Prentiss said, “You want to hear something funny?”
“Okay.”
“I got a call yesterday from a newspaperman says he has Leon Meed’s journal or some type of book, and my name’s in it and it mentions how he disappeared in front of me and some other people.”
Steve scraped the logo from a drink coaster. “That’s funny.”
“I haven’t got to the funny part yet, and that’s how you brought up Leon recently. A man deducing might think you’re one of the other people the reporter was talking about.”
Steve’s expression was unreadable. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
Prentiss sipped his juice. “Why’s that?”
“No sane person would believe it.”
“I do.”
“Maybe you should get your head checked.”
Prentiss took another sip of his juice. “When you think on it, it’s incredible that we been friends all this time and never knew.” Another sip. “Day I met him, that afternoon I went on a binge where I flushed everything away, job and AA and friends and what have you. Me and Leon went to the Shanty and had some drinks and he told me what was going on about the disappearing, and before I could pin him down he was gone. Just gone. I used to think about him later when I was detoxing hard, and how he told me no one was worse off than him. Man looked at me and said he would have swapped places with me if he could. Only time anyone ever said that to me.” After a moment of Steve studying him with concern, he said, “What’re the ladies like who came in a while ago?”
“Fine. Good.”
Prentiss tried to be subtle in turning his body from Steve. One of the women Prentiss recognized as a patient from the week before, and the other was—
“Justine,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What?” Steve said.
“We got to leave this place.”
“Now?”
“Unless we can get out sooner.”
“You don’t think they’re attractive?”
“I went on a date with one of them a while back and it didn’t go too good.”
Steve shrugged and they got up. Keeping his face to the wall, Prentiss walked quickly to the exit, followed by his friend. They proceeded to four more bars, each more normal and better patronized than the last, until they found themselves after midnight on a shoulder-to-shoulder dance floor with a group of three women accountants, one of whom suggested that Prentiss take her home. When Prentiss said no it was because he didn’t want sex. This dawned on him while he was removing the woman’s hands from his hips and thanking her for the dance and explaining the inexplicable. He wanted something else. Not ecstasy. Not the easy thing. Something else.
3
Eureka had been unknown to Martin Nemec, age twenty-eight, when he accepted a full-time position at the Times-Standard after graduating from UC Berkeley’s journalism school. But he looked at it on the map and pictured the romance of its geography. The farthest west point on the continental U.S., where you could walk along beaches unmolested by tourists and smog and detritus. Where the redwoods reached up like towers of Babel, supporting their animal inhabitants’ chirps and hoots and calls that added up to one language, incomprehensible to all, signifying life itself. He thought, hanging up the phone with the editor who hired him, that he was lucky to get to work in so enviable a location.
When he arrived on a shadowless day in November, the harsh gray reality of Eureka hit him so hard he felt like he’d gone color-blind. His apartment was a monochrome dump and his office turned out to be a narrow desk in a small building on Seventh Street that smelled of burnt garlic from the Chinese take-out restaurant next door. And when, after three days of assignments, it was obvious that the investigative skills Martin had honed in graduate school wouldn’t be called for, he began to feel the glacial creep of despair. A demythologized Eureka was one thing, was perhaps to be expected, but to have been promised the chance to practice a wide variety of journalism and then be given only accidents and violent crimes—anything, in short, involving medical trauma—was to find yourself swindled and stuck. You had no choice then but to look, to hope, to pray for an escape.
On December 13, a complete photocopy of Leon Meed’s journal, power-stapled together, sat beside Martin’s home computer. After reading it three times and taking notes and nurturing the idea of writing a story about it, something extracurricular that his boss wouldn’t know about until it was finished, he’d become discouraged over the last few days by the refusal of everyone named in it to talk to him—everyone, that is, but Shane Larson. He hadn’t expected to be invited over for dinners and fireside chats, but he’d hoped for at least two or three forthcoming witnesses who would share their memories of Leon’s psychosis. How else was he supposed to produce a feature complex and human and long enough to put him in the running for a journalism award that might someday land him a job at a bigger paper with an expanding circulation in a city for which the future wasn’t too painful to discuss?
Martin put on his basketball shoes. Hunted around for his sweatpants and had to make do with an old pair of nylon track bottoms. Then, in the hallway just outside his apartment, he bumped into a husky man with a black crew cut. Martin apologized for their physical contact and moved to get around him, but a hand landed firmly on his shoulder.
“You Martin Nemec?” the man said.
Martin nodded.
“Shane Larson. I figured we should meet in person if we’re going to work together. Put faces to names, right? So we could talk here at your place or I’m parked outside and we could go somewhere else. It’s your call. I mean, you’re writing this thing, you’ve got the artistic vision; I’m just an advisor and business partner.”
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Martin peeked around Shane’s head and saw none of the neighbors who normally stood idly in front of their doors at all hours of the day, waiting for whatever they waited for. “Shane, it’s nice to meet you, but like I told you on the phone, I’m dropping the Leon Meed story.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because no one will even confirm that they knew him. As far as I know the journal is just a short story he wrote and he didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown.”
Shane smiled and seemed to take up even more room in the hallway, making passage for Martin impossible. “You got the last part right. Leon didn’t have a nervous breakdown.”
“I know your theory, but—”
Shane shook his head. “For the sake of this story, he had magical powers. Now, let’s talk about who’s on your list and see if we can’t get them to pony up some quotes. If you’re going to write about a guy who could disappear, we’ll need maximum corroboration. My wife’s brother-in-law knows people at the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News—he’s a newsman such as yourself—and even though he and I aren’t exactly close as we speak, you get me the story written down with all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted and I’ll make sure he gets it to the right insiders. This is why I’m here, Martin, to reassure you.”
Martin saw no chance of getting past this man, who was either the dumbest or most intelligent person he’d met in Eureka. “I appreciate that,” he said, and because it seemed wiser to humor Shane than not, he turned around and led him into his apartment. After pouring them each a glass of water, he pointed to the wobbly breakfast table in the kitchen and they sat down.
“The thing you got wrong a second ago,” said Shane, pushing his water away, “was how nobody admits they knew Leon. For starters, there’s me. I’ll back up the disappearing thing till I die. The others will, too, if you give them time. You know what sheep people are; they just need to be persuaded that the shepherd knows what he’s doing. Once I talk to them and set an example, you won’t be able to shut them up.”