by Josh Emmons
Leon nodded. “The staff at Kimbote were generous people. They saw through my admission but let me go anyway. Part of them understood and sympathized with my need to visit the grave of my wife and daughter one last time.”
Martin said, feeling his distrust vindicated, “Your wife and daughter drowned in the ocean and their bodies were never found.”
“By grave I mean the plot of ground where I buried their statue.”
“Which statue?”
Leon said, very quietly, as though raising his voice would alter the words’ meaning, “The one I made of them dead. I buried it outside my cabin.”
Martin tried drawing in his arms to push himself up, thinking it would be good to raise himself to a more civilized height for this conversation, but the gulf between his thoughts and abilities was still too wide. “Why did you do that?”
“In order to be cured of my condition.”
Martin said, clarifying the slur of thoughts in his brain, “Your condition was called a brief psychotic episode that at its worst made you black out and roam the streets of Eureka unaware of where you were and what you were doing. You had moments of consciousness when you’d tell whoever was around that you were disappearing, because you couldn’t think of any other way to explain what was happening to you.”
Leon smiled sadly.
Martin was a formless being. “Dr. Holbrook explained it to me. Your illness was triggered by the tenth anniversary of your wife and daughter’s death, on which you tried to commit suicide by drowning at the South Jetty. When you couldn’t do it, you entered a trance that lasted six weeks. Then you stabilized enough to go home. The authorities found you there and committed you to Kimbote.”
Leon set down his journal and stood up. He wasn’t a tall man, but from Martin’s vantage point on the floor he looked gigantic, an overgrown blue-robed monk. He placed his hands behind his back and looked down pityingly, though it wasn’t clear whether the pity was for himself or for Martin. “That is a concise and faithful account of the doctors’ report, but I ought to tell you that it isn’t true. I did disappear and it wasn’t because of grief—though I know that feeling well—but rather because I refused to accept the death of my wife and daughter. The truth is that for years I lived at so great a distance from reality that it lost control of me.”
Martin was too tired to fully absorb this at once. “I see.”
Leon, perhaps sensing Martin’s desire for them to be on a more equal level, sat down Indian-style on the ground. “I came to realize about my disappearances that they were contained within a maze of those places in Humboldt County that had once been dangerous for my wife or daughter. A club in Old Town where my daughter had gone when she didn’t want to come home at night. The house where my wife had grown up with an abusive father. The truck I’d made my wife sell when I read a report about that model’s bad brakes. The apartment we had lived in when she’d had several miscarriages. Something in me needed to return to those places. Maybe to appreciate what had been survived instead of only regret what took them in the end. I’m not sure. Finally at home it occurred to me that I was in a denial from which only I could rescue myself, and that I had to make a statue of my wife and daughter as they were, not as I wanted them to be. I had to recognize their death.”
Martin felt like a student falling behind with his lecture notes; it seemed impossible to catch up. To stall for time, he said, “And that ended your disappearances?”
Leon said, “Yes.”
Martin felt himself fading. There were questions he felt he should ask. He was forgetting them. “And you really don’t think I’m dying?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
Leon stood up again and said, “And don’t be discouraged by what happened to you at the newspaper. You’ll find another job.”
Martin blinked for longer and longer stretches of time. “It’s a hard business to break into.”
“You could always do something else.”
Martin closed his eyes and tried to open them but they were sealed shut. He didn’t see his apartment again until a phone call woke him up the next day, long after noon.
6
After an extended stay in Eureka, you might have decided it was time to continue your trip north. You might have thought again about Portland or Seattle or Canada, about everywhere that awaited you, and so stopped on your way out at Going Places for maps and travel guides. There, more likely than not, Eve Sieber would have been restocking supplies and greeting customers and ringing up purchases, the gray dyed out of her hair and makeup covering the last vestiges of her adolescence. She hadn’t become a nun or joined a convent. The final throb of communication from Leon hadn’t, at last, demanded that she enter a cloister or even renew her fidelity to God. Its message was subtler, to be pondered while grocery shopping or paying bills. She even half believed its significance was nullified by Christmas Eve, when after the awful surreality of their bus stop talk Joon-sup had arrived at her house in the middle of the night and confessed his love for her and been astounded by her conviction that he was dying of heart disease. Nothing had been less true. He’d said, she recalled sometimes, that he wanted to help her, that she didn’t have to be alone, but she hadn’t heard real love beneath the midnight proclamation, and she’d said they were friends, would always be so, but could not be lovers.
If you’d come in at the right time, you might have heard her talking on the phone to her boyfriend, Prentiss Johnson, who after Christmas Eve had gone to dinner with Lillith once more before deciding that he didn’t want to compete for attention with her neopagan activism. He’d rather be alone and wait for a woman who wanted what he did. Then one day in January as he wheelchaired Eve out of ER following her third lower-back spasm in twelve months, being a quiet, disinterested helper, she asked if something was wrong. “Not that I know of,” he said. “When I was here last month,” she said, “you seemed to be in a better mood.” He pushed a large silver handicap button on the wall and waited while two doors slowly opened outward. “My pet pig died yesterday of pneumonia and it’s affecting me. I don’t mean to be gloomy.” Eve turned as far as her back pain allowed to look up at Prentiss. “I know what it’s like to lose somebody you care about.” His fingers rested on the wheelchair handles and he looked at her for what seemed like several minutes, though it could have been only so many seconds. Then, when she faced forward again, he pushed her through the doorway and down a long corridor with pastel paintings on the walls and green-clad medics and inscrutable beeping machines, walking slowly past the obstacles until she said abruptly, “Would you like to go on a date with me sometime?” After a deliberate pause, during which they kept moving forward together, some people acknowledging them with a smile, others intent on their work, he said, “That would be nice.” And then one date turned into many dates, and what he figured was, your posture got worse and your chances for romance decreased, but they never actually hit zero. Love moved in mysterious ways.
The first person to congratulate Prentiss on his good fortune was Steve Baker, who shook his friend’s hand and hoped the new couple would let him treat them to dinner soon. They sat in the doctors’ lounge, postsurgery, and in answer to Prentiss’s question Steve said that he and Elaine were in marriage counseling, which although not yet a reconciliation was at least an improvement over their cold war preceding Christmas. He said that after discovering his culpability in relationships—a self-recognition that he marveled could have come so late in life—he had thought his romantic life finished until Sadie Jorgenson helped him understand that knowing his real motivations could liberate him as easily as confirm his sense of destiny, that he was not predetermined, that he had a choice. Prentiss said this was the best thing he’d heard from his friend in months.
Activity at Steve’s office, the Coastal Orthopedic Medical Group, was no greater or lesser than usual, so its secretaries, specifically Lillith, could still steal occasional hours to work on their own projects. For Lillith t
his meant converting the scrapped winter retreat plans into a summer solstice celebration to be held on June 21, a minor Sabbat. With a carryover budget and new contributions already pouring in from all over northern California, she’d booked a high-rent location at the crescent bend of the Eel River near Garberville, as well as quality PA equipment for the music and spell recitals and announcements. For the program, she had confirmed a good roots band and two baroque/fx disc jockeys and a highly placed witch from a southern Washington coven. A Wiccan caterer had volunteered to work for cost. Through all of this Lillith felt free of the disappointment that had afflicted her in December; putting a foot forward she didn’t doubt the solidity of the ground beneath her.
To promote the solstice celebration, Lillith would appear on Live from Somewhere with Barry Klein, who over the past two months had become one of her closest friends. The day after his Christmas Eve encounter with Lillith, Barry had gone to her house and apologized again, and what should have been a short visit, the first of a series he was making to former guests on his show, turned into a three-hour tête-à-tête. When he left they agreed to have lunch together the following day, and so began a relationship that in later years would make Lillith think that Prentiss might have been right about the interconnectedness. For his part, Barry didn’t so much think he’d improved as a human being—lost his cattiness or love of cruel humor—as recognize and respect the factors contributing to others’ beliefs and customs that were alien to his. It was as though his mental aperture had widened overnight. It was as though he’d changed his life.
Leaving Eureka, with or without the radio on, you might have passed the street corner of Seventh and H, where a three-foot-high white banner announced the grand opening of the Joon-sup Experience in four months. Joon-sup was there every day, working with an architect, city code inspector, chief contractor, and crew of three carpenters to convert what had once been a stationery shop into a fifteen-table restaurant. At night he went home to his girlfriend, Justine, whose news two months before that she was pregnant had not, as he would have bet his life before then, upset him. Instead his whole body had started trembling and he’d had a foreglimpse of parenthood, of incredible future joy and heartbreak, which made insignificant every objection he’d had to it. Now when he got home he experimented with recipes and debated boy and girl names and practiced the harmonica and found as many ways to help Justine as she did to help him. Once a week he and Eve went running, and he wondered, when not too overwhelmed with embarrassment, what had caused him to declare his love for her. He never looked at his statue. His child would be wholly American, and he was neither proud nor ashamed of the fact. It was only a starting point, after all.
With the possible exception of Joon-sup, no one was prouder of the Joon-sup Experience than Sadie. She missed him as a patient—their meetings had stopped the day he mentioned his turnaround about fatherhood—but the prospect of seeing him at his restaurant while eating one of his barbecue entrées made up for it. She began power walking two miles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the same days she had lunch with Bob. They flirted and she no longer discussed her patients other than to vaguely allude to this or that success: this lasting detox, that quell in the panic disorder. Instead, for conversation they turned to the Highway 101 rerouting vote then approaching, and to the fall’s mayoral candidates. Sometimes, to spice up the afternoon, Sadie recounted the latest goings-on in the state’s prosecution of Shane Larson. Having testified that Shane was, as far as she knew, the only person to have terrorized her, she was given regular updates by the district attorney.
Shane’s condition lent the case a touch of pathos, for in his Christmas Eve car crash he had been severely burned, and lost sensation in over sixty percent of his permanently scarred body. If convicted of both charges against him—involuntary manslaughter (the victim, Shannon Koslowski, was a semiretired trucker) and arson—he would spend a maximum of twelve years in the Pelican Bay State Prison an hour north of Eureka, near Crescent City. He was resigned to whatever happened. He admitted his guilt and expressed remorse, for there seemed little point in anything but contrition now. He lay in a prison hospital bed at night, forever unaroused, and saw the futility of his former schemes and rages. He hadn’t been meant for wealth, and now the varieties of his suffering were all one, although perhaps, he thought in the darkness after lights-out, someday the miracle of modern science would restore his capacity to feel.
One of the key witnesses in the trial, Martin Nemec, had gone back to work for the Times-Standard shortly after Christmas, when the combination of his innocence and the arson story’s appeal to local readers prompted his editor to invite him back gruffly and with a small raise. Martin saw it as a temporary return and began networking right away with his graduate school friends for openings at other papers around the country. At the same time, he also received calls, one by one, from the people mentioned in Leon’s journal. He declined their offers for reminiscences and Leon stories, because although this was the West, when the legend became fact he would not print the legend.
On a cold morning in March, the only person not to have volunteered her account of Leon to Martin, Elaine, lost a contact lens at the front of her classroom while explaining the checks and balances of the U.S. government’s three branches. “Oh, shit,” she said unconsciously, eliciting a ripple of laughter from the boys and girls in their extravagant clothes and accessories—the cherry-flavored lip gloss and ankh earrings and leather-tasseled friendship bracelets—who took the opportunity of her bending down to talk and hit one another. “Everyone quiet down!” she said, on her knees and frustrated at not finding the lens. The kids obeyed for ten seconds and then the noise built again to crescendo. Elaine stood up carefully holding the dirty lens like a drop of holy water. Grabbing her purse, she appointed Roderick in charge while she went to the bathroom. There were no checks and balances here, but a strict hierarchy of command.
Elaine fixed her vision and was back in the hallway when she heard a muted scuffle coming from her classroom. She neared the door just as a loud thump sounded against it. “What’s going on?” she demanded, walking in on a scene of Usman and Darrel standing over a floor-sprawled Roderick like ten-year-old mercenaries. “I leave you alone for two minutes.” The boys were silent and the class looked as though this were a television nature show whose outcome they could not affect, as though these rules of the jungle could only be observed and were no more malleable than those of their government. “Would anyone like to tell me happened?” No. “Are we going to have to go to Principal Altman’s office?” Yes. “Do you understand how much worse it will be for you there than here?” No answer. “All right, let’s go.”
Elaine led the boys down the hallway and to the left past the trophy display case—Muir dominated the seventh- and eighth-grade basketball world and had always done so—and the wall-hung flags of California’s bear and America’s stars. A vast collection of gold-tinged holiday pictures drawn by kindergarten Klimts. The door to Principal Altman’s secretary’s office was open, beyond which the secretary sat in front of a computer clutching reading glasses and a translucent tissue.
“Is she in?” asked Elaine.
“Talking on the phone,” said the secretary. “She wants to see you, though, so it’s good you’re here.”
“I need to deposit these children with her. They’ve been naughty.”
“She won’t be much longer.”
“I’ll just leave them, if you don’t mind. Tell her I’ll come back during my class’s PE period.”
Usman and Darrel looked at each other; Roderick was not part of their confidence and appeared worried. They whispered something to him. He took a step back. Elaine pointed to the chairs they were to sit in.
“It looks like she’s off now.” The secretary rose and opened the door and spoke into the room.
“You called her already?” shouted Gale the principal. “Elaine, come in!”
Elaine closed the door behind her and—impatient
to get back to her classroom—briefly recounted the disorderly but tight-lipped scene she’d found in her classroom, and how she had to leave young Usman, Darrel, and Roderick in Gale’s hands. “Roderick is clearly the victim,” she said, “but you know the code of ethics boys have. He can’t say anything or they’ll beat him more. Maybe you could pretend to punish him in front of Usman and Darrel, and release him later.”
“Good idea.” Gale sat up straight in her chair and folded her hands on a stack of manila folders. A computer nodded off to sleep in front of her. “Have a seat and prepare yourself. I have news.”
“What is it?”
She broke into a grin. “You won the Humboldt County Teacher of the Year Award.”
Elaine stopped fidgeting.
“I was just talking to some of the state superintendent’s representatives, and they think this assures us a higher ranking and designation as a California Distinguished School, which means more money, more resources, more everything. When I talked to the nominating committee they said that your reputation, as well as your student success statistics and the fact that no one from Humboldt has ever won, give you a better than fighting chance of winning the state award.”
“That’s—I don’t know what to say.”
“Then just sit there and smile.”
“You’re sure there hasn’t been a mistake?”
“Positive.”
“I should probably tell you that I couldn’t accept the state prize if I won.”
Gale frowned and knitted her fingers tightly together. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to leave Eureka.”
“Don’t worry about that now. You should be in heavy celebration mode. Take Steve out for dinner tonight.”