by Josh Emmons
“How do you know this crowd?” Prentiss asked.
“I’m a clerical assistant at the office,” Lillith said. “What about you?”
“I’m an RN at the hospital. I probably wouldn’t have come, but Steve and me are friends and he said it would be a good time.”
From nearby they heard Steve’s badly constrained voice, “I’m the one picking fights?”
Prentiss said, with enough force to tamp down the nearby indiscretion, “What’s going on with the wooded area up next to your office parking lot? They thinning it or what, because the other day I drove by and it’s not dense like it used to be.”
“People from the park service are removing sick trees,” Lillith said. “But you’re right that it’s really noticeable. Maybe they’re taking out more than they’re supposed to.”
Prentiss was about to speculate when they heard Steve say, “I’m referring to Leon Meed. I told you about him and you dismissed me like I was crazy.”
“Is that what this is about?” came Elaine’s equally strident voice.
“It’s not about anything.”
Prentiss and Lillith uncomfortably sipped their beverages and neither found anything to say.
“Isn’t it?” Elaine said. “Because I talked to Sadie, and she saw Leon back then, too, and you know what? She said he was a magician who pretended to disappear all over Humboldt County. It was a trick, an act. He tricked you. That night at dinner I was just pointing out that there was probably a reasonable explanation for what you saw, which I then found out there was.”
“So you believe Sadie and not me.”
“This isn’t about belief.”
“No, it’s about trust and support and faith that you don’t have.”
“Faith in what?”
Almost against their will, Lillith and Prentiss turned to see Steve leaving the room, ignoring on the way boisterous back slaps and half-articulated invitations for him to stop and chat. When the door closed behind him they turned to resume talking—about anything—and Elaine approached them then with the color drained from her face.
She said, “Steve’s not feeling well. He wanted me to say good night to you for him.”
“Of course,” Lillith and Prentiss overlapped.
Elaine appeared ready to cry. “So we were talking about New Year’s resolutions, right? You both don’t want to—I’m sorry, I think I should go, too. He might need help getting home.” She touched Prentiss and Lillith briefly on the elbow before picking up her purse and following the path her husband had taken out.
When she was gone, Prentiss said, “I’m torn at this moment because I know something about their argument, and I could go after Elaine and offer my perspective.”
“About the magician they mentioned?”
Prentiss nodded.
Lillith had too little time—the split second accorded to all responses between people who don’t know each other well—to decide what to say. “I knew him, too.”
“That right?” Prentiss said.
Don’t be foolish. Don’t go into the pseudofeminist mysticism of it. “We met ten years ago, just briefly.” She was grateful that before Prentiss could say anything two of her secretary colleagues stopped to join them, and the conversation turned to their bosses’ moodiness and the declining reputation of Eureka’s public schools, and Prentiss, unable to contribute, broke away and annexed himself to a group of men discussing the proposed Highway 101 rerouting. Lillith and Prentiss stole glances at each other for the rest of the night, but never at the same time.
In her kitchen the next morning, Sadie smoked seven cigarettes in a row, lighting each one after the first with the ember of its predecessor, the room seeming to grow smaller the longer she sat in it. The idea was occurring to her, as it had before, of moving to San Francisco to attend culinary school and become a chef. She’d always enjoyed cooking and, if her Swedish pancakes were any indication, had great reserves of natural ability. The change would be stimulating and perhaps she’d even find as well as know what to do with love. Sadie Jorgenson: late-blooming nomad, epicure, and romantic heroine. Why not? Because, she considered, passing the baton of life from one dwindling cigarette to another, her professional crisis extended beyond herself now. Elaine had asked for help and she had said no. They were friends. And no matter what she’d said and thought about therapy not working, some of her patients did improve. Some conquered addictions and overcame guilt and laid phobias to rest. Some stopped disliking themselves. Some saved their relationships.
And forget that Sadie was professionally equipped to facilitate Elaine and Steve’s communication, she had a moral obligation to do so. If a corollary to the Hippocratic Oath existed, it was that you shall not withhold treatment when needed. There were duties. There were thou shalts and she knew them and scooted her chair back and took an elephantine drag on two cigarettes simultaneously, one a long thin finger and the other a bony stub, and spied her cornflower-blue telephone on the countertop made ghostly by sifted flour. She knew Elaine’s number.
When her kitchen became too small to accommodate these thoughts, she got up to go for a walk. Slipped into a jogging suit that she used primarily for walking—and then only rarely—and a pair of unscuffed tennis shoes. Outside, she made it to the bottom step of her front porch before noticing a tall man approach her on the stone slab path from her gate.
“Sadie?” he said.
“Who’re you?”
“Shane Larson. I was about to knock on your door.” When he came near enough, she could tell that he wore an imitation wool suit and cologne that smelled like a child’s bubble bath. With the ersatz smile and penetrating gaze of someone who decided others’ personalities in an instant, he was either a salesman or a therapist. “We talked on the phone the other day about an interview request you turned down.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you.”
Sadie said, “You left a disturbing message on my phone.”
Shane shrugged as though be-that-as-it-may. “I’m hoping you can help me understand why you lied to someone who’s trying to write about local events for the Times-Standard, why you denied knowing Leon Meed.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’ve taken the trouble to visit you and I’d like an explanation.”
“As if I give a shit. Now, really, I’m busy so you’d better leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere until we work this out. Maybe you were scared and didn’t think it over and so that’s why you went to the cops. I’d accept that as a reason, and I’d say that you have a chance to make things right by calling Martin today.”
“I’m not calling anybody.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
Shane took an intimate step forward, as though to give Sadie a kiss, and she saw his pockmarked skin and overlarge eyes. She thought of Little Red Riding Hood. He said, “You and me are going inside so you can make that call. I have the number with me, so there’s no reason to put it off.”
Sadie nodded, leaned back, and at the top of her voice yelled, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Shane, startled, slapped his hand over Sadie’s mouth so fast and hard that blood began pouring from her split lip. “Shut up!” he hissed at her. “Shut the fuck up you crazy bitch!” Wide-eyed with pain, she kept up her muffled cries of “Fire” and tried to wiggle her head free while lamely swinging her arms at Shane’s back and shoulders. Then she bit into the meat of his right palm and heard his half-stifled cry as he tore the hand away and they each looked at a glistening red cavity in his palm the size of a quarter. She spat out bits of flesh and resumed screaming until Shane’s left hand loosely replaced his right over her mouth, after which he struck her several times in the stomach with his bloodied right fist, making savage grunts as he did so. Winded, she fell onto him and they both hit the ground hard, where Shane groaned and then climbed on top of her to wrap his slippery hands around her neck. She
screamed “Fire” with decreasing force as he said, “Shut up, you crazy bitch! Shut up!” Grabbing a thorny branch from a rosebush beside the walkway, Sadie whipped Shane in the face with it and gained a moment’s leverage while he rubbed his eyes and coughed. Before either could again assault the other, two police cars pulled up in front of Sadie’s house, having been called by a luckless Jehovah’s Witness from across the street going door-to-door with pamphlets.
“He tried to intimidate me on my own property,” Sadie said to the ranking officer ten minutes later. The officer recommended she go to the hospital and she said she was fine, that the blood on her neck and face was mainly Shane’s. Then he filled out a restraining order for Sadie and supervised while a scowling Shane was escorted to the back of a patrol car.
Once alone, Sadie went to the bathroom to daub her wounds with a cold washcloth and take four aspirin. The very place where ten years earlier the cause of this idiocy—the reporter’s and Shane’s and Steve’s and hers and Joon-sup’s and everybody’s—Leon Meed, had appeared twice. Back then he’d been a nuisance, a gadfly buzzing around the county doing his performance art, unwanted everywhere. She hadn’t been able to account for him and had subsequently become angry that he’d caused so much pain for others. There were online culinary school applications to fill out. And yet she had to acknowledge that when dismissing her bathroom experience ten years ago, as well as Joon-sup’s paranoid speculations, she had, somewhere behind the cellar door of her thoughts, understood that her Leon Meed incident, that communion with something beyond herself, had been left open-ended, unresolved. She would someday have to find closure. San Francisco rent was on another plane altogether from Eureka’s, and how would she support herself as a student? Now, washing the last trace of red from her neck, she regretted that Leon was not coming back, that he was dead and unable to contribute to the Times-Standard story or tell her why. Why. And Sadie, an intelligent, irascible, bored, rational sensual atheist woman, felt this loss with the force of three a.m. nicotine, an unfortunate surge of energy when oblivion would have been sweeter.
At the Eel River that evening, Eve got out of her car wearing turquoise nylon shorts and a sports bra. She recognized Joon-sup’s car two spaces over from hers at the parking area, and then Joon-sup himself as he stepped out to greet her in running clothes and a bright purple headband. She wasn’t prepared to see him, having assumed he’d not show up and then later make an excuse unrelated to his health. Perhaps there would’ve been an emergency at the Better Bagel, or he would’ve been working on a new recipe and lost track of time. The sun was an amber hump beyond the surrounding mountain range. Joon-sup looked, if possible, thinner and more sallow-complexioned than he had the day before; the hair hanging over his headband was dry and lackluster.
“You’re here,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
“Nothing gets past you,” he answered. “What do you think of my new running shoes? They’re going to give me the speed of the gods.”
“I thought you weren’t coming since we didn’t talk on the phone to confirm,” she said.
“I’m going to be better about our runs. No more skipping out. We don’t see each other much otherwise.” Joon-sup jogged in place and wiggled his arms and looked ready to collapse.
“Does Justine know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Where did you tell her you were going?”
“To a movie.”
“Why?”
He looked away. “Just because.”
Eve walked in a circle like she normally did, stretching her calves and hamstrings and raising her arms to loosen her shoulders and neck muscles. Of course Justine wouldn’t want him running. Eve had promised to deter him from exactly this kind of activity. She ought to give an excuse about why she couldn’t run now—she was feeling a creeping nausea or dizziness—and suggest they validate his lie by going to a movie instead. Make him do something sedentary and retiring. Make him ease slowly into death, as if it were cold water.
But before she could say anything he was running toward the riverbank path they always followed, shouting, “You’ll never catch me!” and laughing like a child. There was something openly carefree about it, as though he’d forgotten his condition or at least deemphasized it in his mind—as though being with Eve, who he thought knew nothing about his heart disease, sent it into remission.
“Wait!” Eve called after him. “Come back!”
He kept going and was now seventy-five feet away, kicking up pebbles.
Eve had no choice but to run as fast as she could until she reached him. “Is this a race?” she panted. “I wasn’t ready.”
“That’s the point.”
“But your new shoes already give you an advantage.”
“No, they don’t. I was just saying that.”
They ran in silence and Eve tried to think of ways to steer them back to their cars, but none came to mind. She couldn’t feign feeling unwell now that they were already matching strides. An opportunity lost. She had to hope—and it wasn’t an impossible hope—that the run would be uneventful, or even good for him. Who knew but that the happiness he derived from forgetting his illness might slow its progress?
“Did you get the threatening call about Leon?” asked Joon-sup.
“Yes.”
“You think they’d do that if it were just an innocent news story?”
“It’s not ‘they,’ ” Eve said. “It’s not even the reporter. It’s somebody named Shane acting alone because he thinks there’s money in it.”
“That’s one possibility.”
Eve lacked the strength to go over it again. Government conspiracy or divine plan, environment or numen. She had nothing new to contribute to the argument, and just then she felt unable to uphold her end. Because what if she’d been wrong to suppose Leon’s disappearances were acts of God? Leon had given her no message, pointed toward nothing explicitly higher than himself. There was a bite in the air, a pain accompanying deep breathing. Usually she lived with this ambiguity—with her doubt—as a crucial part of her Christian faith, but just now, seeing her friend huffing beside her, she wanted Leon to return, if only for an instant, to tell her she was right to interpret him as she had. She was right to accept death and solitude as God’s will. After a moment, she said, “Have I ever told you how much I like Justine?”
“You’ve never met her.”
“She’s answered the phone a couple times when I’ve called. She seems warm and considerate.”
“Those aren’t the first words that come to my mind about her.”
“I know you have problems, but all couples do. The core thing is that she loves you and you have a deep commitment to each other.”
“Our fights are getting worse. And now she wants us to move to San Diego, as if I didn’t hate that city more than anywhere besides Pusan. We’ll be in the middle of a huge row and she’ll launch a pro–San Diego campaign, like it’s the answer to all our problems.”
“San Diego is beautiful and has a world-class zoo.”
“She thinks that I’m too attached to my friends, and that if we moved there I’d be more open to having kids. It isn’t about my friends, though.”
“You might like San Diego. It’s changed a lot in the last fifteen years, gotten more liberal.”
“I doubt it. But anyway that’s just a fantasy. We’ll probably break up tomorrow.”
“You can’t think that. That’s not going to happen. She wouldn’t let you guys get to that point.”
Joon-sup looked at her. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Then why are you saying how deep our commitment is to each other? I’ve never been less happy, and she’s miserable. There’s no reason for us to stay together except out of habit, which is a bad reason to go on.”
They came to an abandoned four-wheel recreational vehicle parked on the river’s edge covered with mud and clumps of grass, its rubber wheel flaps che
wed up and perforated; next to it lay a dead Chinook salmon like a corroded metal instrument. A mile in the distance the riverbend where they would turn back began its arc. Eve listened for any change in Joon-sup’s breathing to indicate stress or fatigue. The rocks below them grew indistinct in the twilight; some were pointy and painful to land on in her thin-soled shoes.
Eve said, “There are difficult times in every relationship, but you’ll work through them.”
“How would you know? You haven’t been in a relationship in ten years.”
“I haven’t forgotten how hard they are.” The bottom of her left foot began to ache and there was an unpleasant edge in Joon-sup’s voice.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” he said. “For everyone but you relationships are great. A million men would love to make you happy, but you won’t give them a chance. It’s like you might as well be a nun.”
They ran slower and her ache was more pronounced. “Nun, that’s extreme,” she said. Her face was red and it could have been from the cold or the exercise or the effort of withstanding the pain. She’d never heard Joon-sup be so mean.
“You’ve isolated yourself in a dangerous way,” he said. “You’ve kept people out for so long that they may not be able to get back in. You’re going to end up all alone.”
Eve knew that Joon-sup was talking out of anger—at himself, at his illness, at the world—and she forgave him. They ran slower still as she began to favor her right foot. Her sports bra was losing its firmness and she’d have to get a new one. When they neared the turnaround bend they were little better than walking; she explained about her foot and he said he understood. Maybe there was truth to his criticism, whether or not Leon was a fuse burning all the way to God. She had rejected every suitor since Ryan, had worn porcupine quills that maybe weren’t as detachable as she’d thought they were. And now she wanted so much to stop Joon-sup and take his hand and tell him that she was there for him during this awful time, that she cared about him deeply, that he wouldn’t end up alone. You didn’t think you had all the time in the world with people, but you thought you had more than there ended up being.