by Josh Emmons
At the bend’s most acute point Eve asked to stop. She lifted up her left foot and it felt like it was still being pressed into the ground. Joon-sup said they could walk back slowly, and he offered his shoulder as a crutch on which to put her arm. As they pivoted around Eve thought how strange it was, in an almost auspicious way, that their roles of care-provider and care-recipient were reversed, if only for a little while.
But then what? When Joon-sup died and the number of her deceased friends someday overtook that of her living, when her chances for companionship had disappeared because she’d once seen a miracle? You only found God when you were ready for Him, yet finding Him didn’t guarantee understanding or ever being sure of your discovery. She hopped along on Joon-sup’s shoulder and there was no final adjustment.
That night St. Joseph’s Hospital was busy, its halls like arteries pumping doctors and patients and nurses and gurneys throughout the building’s central nervous system. In one of its outer extremities, the cafeteria, Steve and Prentiss sat down at a table with a snow globe at its center—seasonal flair—drinking coffee. They’d just done a total hip and were exhausted. Doctors and patients wandered in and out like wraiths among the visiting relatives and friends who, depending on the vagaries of fate and medical science, were either cheerful or despondent.
Prentiss said, “Allow me to ask how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine.”
“You know what I mean.”
Steve pulled a five-dollar bill from his open white coat and creased it down the middle. “I’m going to get a cream pie. You want one?”
“No thanks.”
Steve wrapped the bill around his thumb and went to the dessert counter. Set on a bed of ice and decorative lettuce leaves, pieces of pie and cake were cellophaned and as glossy as wax figures. He pressed the top of a lemon meringue wedge and left a fingertip indentation. When he got back to the table, Prentiss said, “Of course I’m referring to Mazotti’s. The way you didn’t say nothing all night except argue with your wife and then leave her standing there.”
“I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable.”
“I don’t care about that. What’s important is you think she’s going to leave you, but I don’t see it. She don’t believe you about Leon Meed? So fucking what, man. You know? You said the other day how you never talk about it on account of no one’d believe you.”
Steve took a bite of cream pie. “Let’s not discuss it. Tell me about your love life. What’s going on?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I appreciate it, but there’s nothing more to say.”
“This withdrawal thing you talked about at the Ritz. It’s going to mess you up, and I don’t want—”
Steve said sharply, “We’re either going to move on to something else or we’re going to shut up, okay?”
Prentiss leaned forward and said with an acquiescence uncannily like a warning, “If you want to lose your grip, don’t think I’ll force it.”
“I don’t mean to be like this. I’m not feeling well.”
“I know.” Prentiss sat back in his chair and laid his fingers on the edge of the table as if it were a piano. He looked warily at his friend. “I called a woman the other day.”
Steve managed a smile. “That’s great. Who?”
“Lillith Fielding.”
“Lillith. She’s attractive.”
“She is that.”
“How’d it go? The conversation.”
“Didn’t happen. I left her a message and she didn’t call back.”
“Maybe she’s been busy.”
“No, she’s not interested. It’s what I expected.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I was being my most charming self on her voice mail, too. You’re aware that no one responded to my Times-Standard personals ad. I’m putting myself out there and people aren’t taking advantage.”
“The Times-Standard is the wrong approach. It’s not the place to look for love. You had the right idea going to the Ritz. Or try the Internet, or take dance lessons. I heard that ballroom dancing is the place to meet women.”
Prentiss smoothed down his freshly created goatee and smiled at a cowlicked baby staring at him over its mother’s hunched shoulder. “I was the one told you that, and that’s on account of a friend of mine met his girlfriend there, but I went once and there was about ten men for every woman, which supposedly was unusual but I can only go by my own experience.”
“Don’t get discouraged. It’s hard to find someone.”
Prentiss finished his coffee and stared at a painting of the Virgin Mary on the cafeteria wall. She had a pitiful look, like she could dole out sympathy until Kingdom Come and still have more left over. “Lillith saw Leon back then.”
“What?”
“After you left, we talked about it. She didn’t say much, but I could tell she had an opinion and we would’ve got into it except some other people came up to us then. So I thought I’d call her and see where she’s at, because I been thinking, turning this matter over in my mind, that maybe me and her had this happen to us for a reason. You, too. Maybe Leon’s the thing in a mysterious way made us be friends. Like maybe we saw him disappear so later on we’d sit in this cafeteria here and I’d tell you how to save your marriage and you’d tell me to hold out for love. You know, like there’s a purpose to it all.”
Steve said, “It’s just a coincidence.”
“But then it wouldn’t mean nothing.”
“Why does it have to mean something?”
“It just does.”
Steve looked at the cream pie and it was perfectly immobile. He and Anne had had cream pie on their first date, and on their second, and on their third, so that it became their flirting activity, and their celebration activity, and their why-not activity, which he’d never told Elaine, because he’d had cream pie with her also and didn’t want her to think it had any old-romance connotations. Although it did. Everything had old-romance connotations. Making love, going shopping, making plans, going over your day, making up, going away, making dinner, going for a walk. He’d done it all with Anne, and although he thought he’d successfully wiped away the associations so that what he and Elaine had, at least in the beginning of their relationship, felt new and unloaded with meaning—so that he’d cleared off the palimpsest—those old associations had simply gone into remission. A cream pie could never be just a cream pie and Elaine would move to Sacramento.
4
Elaine talked about the potential highway rerouting to her class on the final day of school before winter vacation. She couldn’t remember the last night she’d slept fully and was now going into a level of detail about Eureka’s economics that mystified her fourth-grade students. They stared at her like she was speaking in tongues. The hyperactive boys who’d been separated at the beginning of the year stopped carving comic-book epics into the undersides of their desks, and squinted at her. Girls quit writing notes about the cuteness of this or that boy or television actor or purse set, and tried to decide if they could be tested on this information later. On the chalkboard Elaine drew three likely routes the bypass would follow and calculated the exponential harm done to local businesses based on their distance from it. The final bell rang at noon and the kids got up and filed out.
Elaine leaned against the American history calendar tacked up beside the American flag. To belong to a country so big. To see your little corner of it go through upheavals. Elaine had not had sex with her husband in three weeks, which in some marriages was unmentionably brief. In some marriages once-a-month sex was a goal to be worked toward with instructional videos and frank bedside confessionals. Not in hers, though, at least not before now. Elaine didn’t care that much—you could live without sex, millions did, and other pleasures became correspondingly sweeter, as blindness enhanced one’s hearing and sense of smell—and she would have quietly accepted it if it weren’t symptomatic of the rupture taking place between her and Steve. She was suppose
d to have graded and handed back her students’ math and English tests. She was supposed to have finished teaching a unit on North Coast agriculture. Christmas was almost there, and Steve now slept in Abraham’s room. Trevor was going skiing during vacation with his friend Toby, a dangerously scatterbrained kid whose mother had called her twice to say that he’d been arrested for shoplifting and to ask if she could help her prevent him from doing it again.
She was unsure if she could prevent anything from happening.
The room’s radiator droned irritably as she packed her bag for break. Humming a melody that began as something jazzy and ended up a commercial jingle without her noticing the transition, she unplugged the globe and the computers, abandoned her desk plant, turned off the lights, and walked out to the faculty parking lot, where hers was the last car. The day was wet and thick with ashy fog. On her way home the brakes of her car screamed at stoplights and the mistakes of other drivers made her panic. Pulling up in front of her house, she saw Steve’s car in the driveway, where it shouldn’t have been at one seventeen on a Wednesday. She had a brief, stoptime flashback of the day she’d caught Greg with another woman. Her stomach turned at the idea of going inside. She could drive away and come back later.
Elaine turned off the car’s ignition and got out and walked to the window, where overgrown bougainvillea hid her presence. The living room was empty and there was something different about it: a blank space on the wall above the couch where there used to be an Egon Schiele print. Suitcases sat by the coffee table. Steve walked in carrying his dress clothes in protective wrapping, with plastic coat-hanger rings poking out of the top like question marks. His model tools sat in a box next to the suitcases.
Elaine went inside. “What’s going on?”
Steve set down his clothes and looked at her and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“It’s a half day. Shouldn’t you be at the office?”
He seemed confused by the question, then said, “I’m leaving.”
“Were you going to tell me, or was I supposed to piece it together on my own?”
“We’re not talking.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Nobody has to take the blame.”
“So this is like an earthquake? An act of God?” Elaine wasn’t crying. A steel band was wrapped around her head and heart. She felt nothing.
“I see where we’re headed. I know what’s happening.”
“Then maybe you could tell me, because I don’t see anything and I have no idea what’s happening. If this is really about me not believing that you saw a man disappear ten years ago, then fine, I’ll believe. I’ll believe anything you tell me. If this trip into your head and out of this house is really about Leon Meed, then let’s forget it and move on because otherwise we’re not half the couple I thought we were. Otherwise I’ve been a fool for laboring under the misconception that we love each other, and I’ll have to take it all back.”
“I love you, and that’s the problem.”
Elaine placed her hands on the headrest of a sofa-chair. “Don’t say that; that doesn’t make sense. We don’t need to be completely rational, but we have to be honest about how we feel.”
“I am being honest.”
“If you love me, why are you going? Please answer that question.”
“It’s not permanent. It’s just a test, to see how it works.”
Elaine waited a minute and said, “Is this all you’ll give me?”
“What?”
“This cryptic bullshit about love being the problem and testing our separation. Is this all you have to say?”
Steve went into the bedroom.
“Okay!” Elaine called after him. “You’re moving out because of a dinner spat weeks ago and you’ve done an incredible job of helping me to understand what it means. So have a fabulous life.”
Elaine left the house. Her car was hollow tin. She got in and closed the door and started the engine and pulled her seat belt tight across her and only then heard the sound of the door closing. Men left. It’s what they did. She would live the next two years alone with Trevor, and after that simply alone until she died. These days your children drifted away (it’s what they did) and your house became a museum of which you were the sole custodian, and occasionally your kids and their kids visited—the museum was free to them—to see the exhibit you’d kept in working order. Humans weren’t such exceptional animals after all. They did not mate for life and their claims otherwise and their impermanence were pitiable and typical and yet—
Teresa Harrison was walking someone else’s dogs. A newspaper boy was flicking rubber bands at a crying girl. Eureka had no ice-cream vans. And yet didn’t everyone succumb to defeat sometimes and convince themselves of dark underpinnings, and say good-bye cruel world and sit with the fool on the hill and have sympathy for the devil? Everyone did. Everyone composed funereal elegies for themselves. And then everyone felt differently. Then they thought they’d been wrong to be so cynical—that what they’d built, the intimacy they’d worked so hard and so joyfully and so painfully to establish, shouldn’t crumble to nothing. That they shouldn’t let it. That they should work through emotional wind and sleet and snow to protect it so long as they had the strength.
When Elaine got home that night she made dinner and watched an old comedy, all misplaced leopards and myopic zoologists, and ignored the draftiness of her house’s newly emptied spaces.
A less original man than Shane—one more susceptible to cliché, more stupidly optimistic—might have sought comfort in an adage like “When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.” Having botched an attempt to partner and make money with that invertebrate dickhead Martin Nemec, and then been sucker-kicked by a fat bitch in a tracksuit, and then spent a sexually erroneous night in the county jail, he might have said to himself, “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” But Shane wasn’t a Pollyanna fool. He was too angry for bullshit self-help mantras or mental Heimlich maneuvers that head shrinks on TV tried to sell you. The only maxim he liked was maximum revenge. So as he made one unsuccessful call after another to old friends asking them to post his bail—hearing so many variations on the theme of “Shane Larson? When did you get back? And you’re in jail that’s too bad. I’d love to help but I’ve got X payments coming up and money’s tight right now”—and as he was then forced to go with a bondsman named Hector, an upstream swimmer from the barrio whom Shane would have enjoyed bashing-thrashing as a youth, being as the guy was a dirty spic and likely to have moved into a Eureka neighborhood that, once spoiled, would attract further racial impurities until it became as muddy as Los Angeles, Shane composed a list of things he could do to those responsible for his current woes.
The acts he considered were, in no particular order: burning down their houses, mugging them, hurting their families, raping them, stealing their cars, kidnapping them, breaking their bones, planting drugs or weapons or child pornography in their homes and then alerting the police, injecting them with AIDS, or something worse, the specifics of which he hadn’t yet worked out.
After the bail came through from Hector and the release papers were signed, Shane left the county jail and dropped the sheaf of restraining orders filed against him into a trash can and went home to his apartment. He was tired and ass sore, but at least he had a mission. Kicked off his shoes and sucked dry three Bud Lights. Then, flipping through his mail on the fire escape outside his kitchen window, he opened a letter from Mort Rasmussen, one of Eureka’s top estate lawyers, whose father had bought a beautiful platinum-coated coffin from Shane ten years earlier, informing him that he’d been named a beneficiary in Leon Meed’s will. He was to call Mr. Rasmussen at his earliest convenience to arrange a time to pick up the inheritance, though when he tried the number a prerecorded message listed the law office’s hours of operation as nine to five. His watch said six thirty p.m. What could Leon have left him, and why? The why didn’t matter. The important question was what. Shane�
�s wife was divorcing him, Morland Memorial Services hadn’t hired him back, and he was riding a hefty balance on his credit card. He needed an infusion of cash and would have asked no questions of a crippled child delivering blood-soaked bills in a paper bag. Perhaps, he thought as he sat down on his lawn chair, Leon had left him the ten-thousand-dollar reward money that was rightfully Shane’s from years ago. Choking on his deathbed, Leon may have felt some of the remorse that should have been his constant companion ever since sneaking out of the car when Shane wasn’t looking and then condescending to forgive him a few days later at a bar when they ran into each other, when Shane had been temporarily dispirited.
This unexpected windfall almost overrode Shane’s anger before falling back to become a healthy but second-tier consideration. There was nothing to do about it until the next day, whereas his plans for retribution required immediate planning. With so much fresh and substantiated evidence against him lodged with the police, he’d have to be subtle in dealing with his malefactors. He’d have to have airtight alibis and ghostlike stealth to pull off robberies or maimings or arson and get away with it.
Unless—and here’s where nothing to lose actually became useful—he was to avenge his honor and then leave Eureka. Considering what he didn’t have—a wife, a job, property—and what he did—a police record, soured professional prospects, sudden wanderlust—he could punish everyone and then go far away, disappear.
Late the next morning, Joon-sup saw Eve’s phone call as a sort of deliverance. From the moment Justine had woken up and told him her dream—of a family reunion at which her table was surrounded by adults and empty chairs, a scene utterly without children—they’d argued about who wasted more food, who sacrificed more for the other’s happiness, whose hang-ups were getting in the way of their shared goals. They’d trotted out the old examples, made the old protestations, used the old rhetorical strategies. Which had left Joon-sup desperate. He didn’t want kids and although he’d never admitted this even to himself, he might have built up the courage to say it out loud if the phone hadn’t rung when it did. He turned away from Justine to take the call and then hung up and refused Justine’s demand to see his phone’s display to verify that it was, as he claimed, Soulbrother rather than Eve who needed help because of car trouble. During his subsequent drive to Sequoia Park he was full of gratitude and something more to Eve, who, when he pulled up beside her three-wheeled car, was sitting on the sidewalk, hugging her knees to her chest.