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Silas found his glasses, wedged between the bottom pillow and armrest, and put them on, though because of the poor lighting outside he still couldn’t recognize the man. Was it Beto the Argentinian stopping by to see if he’d like to fly his remote control airplane with him? Or one of his neighbors hoping to borrow a bicycle pump? Silas didn’t understand why the man wasn’t going to the front door, so he moved to get up and let him in, at which point the man disappeared. Silas was halfway out of his chair when he found himself looking through the window at nothing but a lava rock garden, mulberry bushes, mini lawn, street, parked cars, other houses, and wrought-iron sky. No man. He didn’t rush to conclusions, for he was perhaps hypnagogic, his sleepy eyes playing tricks on him. He sat back down to consider things and adjust his glasses as though they were a radio dial that, properly modified, would clearly broadcast what had been garbled.
He waited and waited and sensed nothing but static.
2 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
In a beige house in the Cutten neighborhood of Eureka, an orthopedic surgeon named Steve Baker entered the music room, where a dark cherry wood piano stood as a four-legged accusation, a sixty-one key universe of potential sound whose silence was the loudest he had ever heard. He sat on the bench in front of it, on lavender varnished cedar dimpled over time by the hard fingernails of hundreds of frustrated eleven-year-olds sitting through thousands of mother-mandated lessons while thinking of millions of other things. He’d fought over this piano, defended his love of it in sotto voce with nothing-could-induce-me-to-give-it-up conviction.
And Anne, his wife, appealing to reason, had pointed out with growing impatience that he never played it, that he’d bought it for their never-conceived child, for the express purpose of her teaching this phantom progeny how to play, because she had studied it all her life, and she loved it and looked forward more than anything to twice-weekly sessions with Wendy, if it was a girl, or William, if it was a boy. She had oiled its strings, tuned it regularly, polished its fine wood grains and lacquered its ivory keys and fluttered around it during the move from Egret Road to Kroeber Lane like a paleontologist transporting a dinosaur egg.
It was absurd not to let her keep it, especially since she’d been so generous toward him with everything else—with the bread maker and the twelve-horsepower rototiller and the waist-high Klipsch speakers—although absurd was exactly what he felt their whole breakup was. Absurd because it was so rational and calculated. Their love? Plus one. His sterility? Minus two. And it was absurd because she insisted on living in a small town (“Any small town, I don’t care. Can’t you see how much choice that gives you? How many options?” she’d asked), and because he couldn’t do little things like stay with her while she finished her breakfast on Sunday mornings—no, he had to retreat to his work study once he was done eating to work on his models, and he wouldn’t acknowledge the symbolic importance of these abandonments—and because they had voted for different candidates in the last mayoral election (“The presidential election, sure, I grant you,” he’d said, shaking the garlic press at her, “that would be enough for you to get angry and say that we’re incompatible. But the Eureka mayor? Who cares?”). The pros and cons of their relationship were weighed, and a gross imbalance was found. Scales didn’t lie. “But scales aren’t the only thing to go by,” he’d said. “Do you really want—because we could adopt and split our time between big and little towns and move toward political consensus in the future—do you really want to let it go just like that?”
Though it wasn’t just like that. She pointed out that he’d conspicuously not mentioned the issue on which he was solely to blame and which most upset her, his inconsiderateness when she felt alone and needed his company, those times when he’d disappear and say he had to be by himself and that it was chemical and nothing to take personally. But how else could she take it than personally? She wasn’t a machine, no matter how radically our language had upgraded from brain hemispheres to hard drives. And maybe this proved in a way that her love for him was insufficient and had always been insufficient, but that the possibility of raising children in a semirural community overseen by a wise, mutually agreed upon mayor had once been enough to supplement her feelings and make the relationship worth working on. Now, clearly, the situation had been exposed for what it was. She had accepted a job in the town of Willits, two hours south of Eureka—he hadn’t even known she’d been looking—and packed up her things and moved out, leaving Steve with an untouched piano and the feeling that he would soon fade away. This was what he heard in the silence, the sound of his own diminuendo.
He closed the piano lid and pinched the tip of his long aquiline nose. His hair, an auburn brown rusting into gray, dug softly into his neck. His fellow doctor Greg Souza’s suitcase lay open on the couch. Greg was staying with him while initiating divorce proceedings against his schoolteacher wife, Elaine, or maybe Elaine was initiating them against him—Steve didn’t know the details of it and thought only that divorce was spreading like a virus.
He decided to go for a drive, which he did as an offensive against depression more frequently than he cared to admit, occasions on which he’d go anywhere, didn’t matter, so long as he was moving and there was music and lots to look at and to distract him. His depression would be subdued temporarily, and he’d arrive home a few hours later, if not mentally restored then at least closer to being able to go to bed.
Today he drove to Table Bluff, a cliff and beach area five miles south of Eureka and near a recently built Wiyot community housing project, an evolutionary step forward in Indian reservations where the land was governed by the tribe but maintained by the State of California. With independent police and dependent roads. Steve passed it and thought, This is the sort of town where Anne and I could have ended up. Maybe not this particular town, because you have to be Native American to live in it, but somewhere this size where real estate is cheap. I could have made that concession.
He saw the ocean in the distance at intervals as the road wound up and down hills, with undulating fields of buffalo grass on the left and isolated homesteads and dilapidated barns on the right. Something was wrong. Steve pressed harder on the accelerator and found himself going slower. The fuel light had been shining empty for who knew how long. A gas can in the back? No, damn it. Embankment park and a leg stretch around the car and some self-reproach for not filling up the tank earlier. It wasn’t more than two miles back to the Wiyot housing project, though he didn’t remember seeing a gas station there. Noise up the road and Steve saw a truck round the bend at a dangerous clip and he stood helplessly—or with what he hoped was a posture of helplessness and entreaty—waving a hand for the truck to stop. It was maybe seventy yards from him when he saw, beggaring belief, a man clinging to the gun rack on the truck’s roof. Lying facedown and spread-eagle, holding the edges of the rack for purchase, this man was head forward and Steve thought he heard—yes, without a doubt he caught—him shouting “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Steve hoped that his and the man’s combined request would bring the truck to a halt, though this hope was dashed as the truck raced past him, its driver with the tensed and fearful expression of someone trying to escape the hounds of hell. Then the truck was gone and Steve stared after it. A haze of dust, nothing. He resigned himself to walking and the thought sank in that he’d just witnessed an act of recklessness for which he’d probably be called in to surgery later that day. And something else wasn’t right. Something even less right than the obvious not-rightness of two men barreling down a country road in equal states of panic and unequal states of personal safety. Steve thought he recognized the face of the man on the roof. It was the fleetingest of glimpses, but still.
At the Wiyot housing project he received a lawn-mower gas canister in exchange for ten bucks and the promise to return it to a stern-countenanced, gloriously ponytailed man also named Steve.
The days passing meant nothing. At the office, the mental exhaustion that used to take ten hours to develop now happened in less than one. Another patient? X rays to examine? Deposing for a malpractice case filed three years ago? His constant torpor made it all seem so useless and unmanageable, like he didn’t have the stamina and couldn’t everyone see how much effort living cost? How it was a trek too far? He had difficulty listening to people. They wanted to tell him things—“my wife’s cousin’s daughter was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, but was disqualified for lying about her LSAT scores, which everyone knows can be taken a million times before applying to law school and they average the scores, should that even be what she wants to do, and believe me my wife’s cousin’s daughter has some real reservations about that”—that he didn’t want to hear. To foster the sense of self rapidly slipping away from him, he moved from his habitual stimulants (coffee, Coke, ginseng root extract) to borderline legal amphetamines that his friend and colleague and current house-guest, Greg Souza, prescribed for him.
This was unfortunate because as a surgeon he depended on his powers of concentration. It was his great gift as a doctor. He’d made a name for himself by being able to do a spine—seven hours of standing in place with his latexed fingers sawing and threading and manipulating microscopic tools—without taking a bathroom break or pausing for a candy bar or sitting down to let his legs uncramp. In another life he’d have made an exemplary monk. Or mime. Or sentry in charge of protecting kings and emperors and other representatives of God on earth.
Before the divorce started he’d spent much of his nonworking time building fantastic miniature reproductions of medieval towns using balsa wood and soft chromium. His Salzburg could hold its own against any model out there. His Venice was the work of a maestro. But now he’d sit down at his worktable with a stack of three-eighthinch wood squares and an X-acto knife and a tube of wood glue, unable to pick up anything without his hands shaking and a drifting—no, a darting—mind. In his current condition the only cities to which he could do justice were World War II–era Dresden or Hiroshima or Coventry. Maybe an earthquake San Francisco. And he’d reached a point in life where he hadn’t any friends. Or: he had friends, but not friends whom he could call and tell about the he-said/she-said of the divorce, the Thursday afternoon meetings at Anne’s lawyer’s office, where he and his lawyer and she and her lawyer sat at a diplomatic table using diplomatic language better suited to the Treaty of Versailles than to the breakup of two people who’d loved each other intensely once, who’d cried when the other got hurt and exulted when the other felt joy and said “forever” and “completely” and “unconditionally.” The end of this marriage foretold everything. It said that he was incapable of sustaining a loving relationship and doomed, at best, to serial monogamy until he died. No growing old with someone. No twenty-year anniversaries and wistful recollections of their younger bodies and younger passions and younger worlds.
His colleague friend Greg Souza’s divorce was because of rote infidelity and Greg had had nothing thoughtful to say on the occasion that he and Steve went through the verbal condolences with each other, the I-can’t-believe-how-everything-changes. Although Greg was technically staying with him until he found an apartment, he’d been spending his nights at Marlene’s and was never around.
So Steve was alone on Saturday, December 11, trembling knife in hand, when the doorbell rang. He’d managed to forget Anne for a minute and was remembering what Silas Carlton, an old patient, had told him about birds: they have extremely small lungs and so use their bones to circulate oxygen. “Very nice,” he said, and opened the door.
Elaine Perry stood with one foot on the welcome mat, holding two plastic garbage sacks. Hints of the previous day’s makeup were so subtle that he thought her lips were naturally the color of persimmons.
“Hi, Steve,” she said.
They hadn’t seen each other in maybe ten months. Anne had always praised Elaine as the best of his doctor friends’ spouses, as a woman wisely unconcerned with extravagant houses and her children’s orthodontic work.
“Hi,” Steve said.
“I don’t want to make this awkward, but Greg said he’d pick up these bags a couple of days ago and he never did. Do you mind if I drop them off? Is he here?”
“He’s out, but I can take them.” They were heavy and full of pointy, uncomfortable objects that dug into him as he held them against his chest. “I wanted to say—I should say I’m sorry about what’s going on.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry for you, too.”
They smiled more by effort than by natural feeling. Like so many outward signs of health and normalcy.
“Would you like to come in?” Steve asked, unsure of what else to say. “For a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks. I shouldn’t be here when Greg comes back.”
Steve was about to tell her that Greg never came back before noon, but then thought better of it. He shifted the bags in his arms and it didn’t occur to him to set them down.
“I hope we can be normal with each other,” she said.
“What?”
“I hope that you being Greg’s friend doesn’t mean we have to avoid each other at the supermarket or in Old Town or wherever.”
“No, absolutely not.” He’d never run into her at the supermarket or in Old Town before, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the future. Eureka was a small enough city that you sometimes saw your dentist or hair stylist or friends’ ex-wives at restaurants. You perfected an ever-readiness to talk about your teeth or hair or neutral, non-friend-related gossip. You skated across the surface reality like a water beetle, and only when the surface broke and you fell in did you feel that drowning was inevitable, that staying afloat had been a fantasy.
Elaine said, “I just—maybe you feel the same I don’t know—I don’t want to feel like getting divorced means that a whole world of people will disappear. You know? All of Greg’s friends and patients I’ve met. I’d hate to think that now we have to act like we’ve never known one another.”
“I know what you mean,” Steve said. “I agree.”
Elaine held out her hand. Still holding the bags, Steve shook it awkwardly with his whole upper torso. Then she turned and walked to the street, massaging her left shoulder with her right hand. Steve watched her get in her car and drive away, someone else’s former everything.
Several blocks away, Sadie Jorgenson’s willpower deserted her in the wall-to-wall linoleum sparklage of her kitchen, with batter all over her hands, making one Swedish pancake after another, smothered in powdered sugar the weight and consistency of pixie dust. She was a therapist whose client list was longer than any of her colleagues’, meaning that at the end of a grueling workweek she owed herself a little—or rather a lot—of pleasure. And so didn’t she feel magical with each bite of pancake, a wild transport to zones of physical ecstasy she never experienced otherwise? Sadie, thirty-seven, hadn’t gotten laid in years, which she knew was partly because of morning binges like this one, but what could she do since the cycle was already started and each production of one kind of happiness diminished her chances for the other? Undress another stick of butter. Fondle the pan handle. And the radio on and she with a lot of boogie left to her bottom that hadn’t lost its attitude, so she let the pancake sizzle while she clapped her hands and danced around the island counter and nodded (“you know it, ah-hahn”) and licked an ample finger.
And yet all this might soon change. Her sister Marlene had called the night before and known the perfect guy, an academic. An academic? Yeah. What’s that mean? Someone who traffics in ideas for a living. That doesn’t sound as lucrative as, say, trafficking in narcotics. It isn’t. Is that why he’s still unmarried? He’s new to town and hasn’t met anyone. I think you two would hit it off. Why? Because he’s interesting. What’s he look like? He’s tall and— How tall? I don’t know, five ten. You call that tall? It’s taller than you. Don’t be rude. How old is he? Thirty-seven. That’s my age. Yeah. Guys don’t go out with women the same age as them. It’d be better if he were older. He’d appreciate me more. He seems above all that. And he’s bald. As long as he has the right head for it. Not too big or bumpy, like a smooth small skull that draws attention to his face. Yeah, sort of. And there’s one other thing. He’s missing four fingers on his right hand from when he was young and worked with heavy machinery. Oh. Other than that he’s normal and attractive. Oh. I didn’t even notice until it came up in conversation. Oh. So what do you say? I wish he hadn’t lost those fingers. I’m sure he does, too. Can I set something up, completely nonbinding and informal, like the four of us have dinner at Folie à Deux this weekend? What four of us? Greg makes four. How can you go out with Greg in public? He and Elaine have a new understanding, an unspoken agreement not to pry into each other’s personal lives. Their personal lives? They’re married. You know what I mean. So what has it become, an open arrangement? With their kids so young? Not open, in that they haven’t discussed it in those meaningful terms, but they’re having problems and are basically separated for a while. Marlene! Homewrecker! He’s a doctor and you’re a nurse and it’s so predictable. How long do you think this can go on? It’s not about worrying about the future. So are you in for dinner? I’ll arrange it and call you back. I don’t know. What else do you have going on in your love life? My love life. Spoken of as a thing in the world. This guy is not an ogre. I didn’t say ogre. I just think after Stan. Stan was three years ago. Yes but the scar tissue. You owe it to yourself to get out of the kitchen—I mean the house, get out of the house for a change and move forward. I can’t believe you said kitchen. What’s this guy’s name? Roger Nuñez. He’s Latino? He’s many things. Does he speak Spanish? How should I know? Do I speak Spanish? How’d you meet him if he’s so new to the area? At Dee Anderson’s. And I’m supposed to be reassured that you met him there? You know for certain he didn’t lose those fingers because of syphilis? It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a respectable artists’ guild meeting. Roger is doing some work on Yurok blankets with someone else at Humboldt State University from the Native American Studies department, and he was at Dee’s on a purely business-type level. It wasn’t anything weird. Hmmm. Okay, I’ll meet him. That’s my girl.
Sadie scraped the last runny spoonfuls of pancake dough from the mixing bowl and dropped them onto the frying pan. So many calories. One dinner with a six-fingered man wouldn’t be the end of the world. And later that day she might go to CalCourts and do a bit of Stairmaster to counterbalance the morning. Patterns of behavior were only unbreakable if you didn’t try to break them.
The next afternoon she fell asleep while watching a documentary about black lesbian poets, this being one of Roger Nuñez’s academic specialties and so part of her homework before the blind date because with the possibility of love you’ve got to be prepared to meet the other person halfway, give-and-take, and when she woke up she remembered a few of the key phrases used—indigenous liminal subalternism, covert clitorogeny—and the pictures of close-cropped Afros and the loving women who sported them.
She was sweaty and had to take a shower. She was also starving and wanted to have some macaroni salad but thought it would spoil her appetite at dinner, which on second thought might be good. Dieticians recommended having six small meals a day instead of three big ones. Marlene’s doctor boyfriend, Greg, had told her this wasn’t true, although Greg was a philanderer who, if he was capable of cheating on his wife, was capable of cheating on Marlene and other lifestyle prevarications. Sadie worried about her sister and took off her blouse on her way to the kitchen and then felt an empowering self-denial and redirected herself to the bathroom.
There she fully stripped and untied her frosted hair, removed her penny-sized earrings. While waiting for the shower to heat up she faced the mirror and thought of how difficult it must be to be black and gay and a female poet all at once. An incredible quadruple whammy. Yet we were all born with certain disadvantages, handicapped in some way or ways from the get-go, condemned to spend our lives developing strengths to make up for our inherited disadvantages. Obesity, religious unorthodoxy, a big nose, eczema, hairiness, hairlessness, a poetic bent. When it came to gender, Sadie could empathize with black lesbian poets, she could say right on and there was that automatic sisterhood, though when it came to being black and lesbian she was just a honky breeder. Some important circles didn’t overlap.
There was a rustle behind the shower curtain and a male voice said, “Oh, ahhh, what the hell!”
Sadie froze. Someone was in the bathroom with her and the door was closed. She felt a fear so heart-lurching of what was about to happen to her that she couldn’t move. A man was lurking and scheming in her shower, hidden by the curtain but there. Surely there. She closed her eyes and the door was closed. There was the squeak of faucet knobs turning in both directions and the sound of water surging and slowing before shutting off completely. A man’s retching and coughing water and throwing open the shower curtains, the screech of rings sliding along the metal bar, some psychotic onomatopoeia. Sadie knew she should try to defend herself but honestly hadn’t the strength, and the man probably had a weapon. Intent on any number of penetrations, sexual and otherwise: vaginally, anally, orally, or perhaps knife stabs to her back, side, front, head. In her mind’s eye she didn’t so much see someone writhing on top of her as imagine him rubbing her face into the floor in an effort to erase who she was. Wasn’t that what violent people did, tried to negate their victims? She saw herself being uncreated.
With her eyes closed the waiting for something to happen took an eternity. She heard the intruder clear his throat and she thought, Soldered sang of elllllll spot. Waiting for the pain to begin. For it all to go blank. Maybe this would be a swift gunshot to the back of her head, and she was about to go to the Great Unknown. Hamlet says relax. She gripped the porcelain sink as though it were a walker, and her eyes were closed so tightly she saw breathtakingly beautiful kaleidoscope patterns on the backs of her eyelids, swirls of inchoate violets and reds and ambers, whorls of abstract space, splintering intimations of something, yes, strangely and unexpectedly, holy. For she was barricaded in her head now, come what may of this intruder. It got to be so that he didn’t matter. When one door closes another opens. She was given over to a vision bigger and more numinous than her normal consciousness; she would survive the pain and emerge as from a chrysalis. Her body would fail, but that’s what bodies did in the end, and the rest would be ascension. She’d shake off a mortal coil that had only ever been a sidelong glance at what’s most true.
Fifteen minutes later Sadie was in a trance, a victory over the normal din of her thoughts. Fearlessly she opened her eyes and light flooded in and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Just for a moment. Then she was cognizant of looking in the mirror and seeing that there was no one else in her bathroom. The curtain was drawn and the water was off, but there was no man there. She hadn’t heard him leave, though she’d been in a state where noise perhaps wouldn’t have reached her. But why would he do it? What would be the point of sneaking into someone’s bathroom and then leaving without further violence? Sadie was on terra firma again and didn’t know what to make of it.
On Monday morning, in relentlessly white northern California, in a land of milk and no honey, Prentiss Johnson was a black man. As black as he could be. As black as any Eurekan could ever, in the wildest flights of their color imagination, hope to be or become. He worked at the public library in the stacks, was six foot three, weighed a hundred and ninety-five pounds, and had a drinking problem. The night before, he’d said it again to eight of the fourteen people who attended his Mad River Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, “I have a problem with alcohol.” Where were the missing six attendees? Probably on a bender through the saloons of Second Street, bottles of Old Crow evaporating before their very eyes, yelling fuck that! at the idea of rehabilitation and the childish amusements offered by sobriety. Prentiss had looked at the white people, each of them so very white, and said, “Every day is a struggle.” What an understatement. What an outlandish reduction of the thirst, like an infant’s, like the desert’s, that he felt every waking second of his life. I am a drain, he thought, capable of swallowing everything. Eight heads of limp hair nodded up and down as he spoke. “I wish I could say it was getting better.”
A week earlier, Prentiss had been at Safeway to pick up some eggs and a bag of potato chips and wound up patrolling the hard liquor aisle, his brain a crashing wave of foam and confusion, feeling an almost sexual longing for the amber beverages lined up in regulated rows. Whenever he got to the end of the aisle and told himself to turn left and leave, to just put that shit out of his sight, because he knew he couldn’t go back to the way it had been, and the life he’d rebuilt after leaving the hospital could fold without so much as a huff or a puff, he turned around and made another pass at Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam and Lord Ron Calvert—all the old aiders and abettors—and thought the magnet’s not losing its pull. A pretty girl with short black bangs whose Bonanza 88 shirt said her name was Eve grabbed a quart of rum and wandered off humming an unhummable song. It was brighter than day in aisle 11. It was baseball-stadium-at-night bright. And then some fourteen-year-old white kid in thrashed army fatigues and ballistic eyes sidled up to Prentiss trying to be cool, the studied subversion, with a “Hey man, what’s up? Me and my friends outside are wondering if you’d be into buying us a bottle of Cuervo and we’d throw in something for yourself, like such as a few beers?” And the kid was so stoned and had such shitty teeth and stupidly cut hair and Prentiss knew it wasn’t a play at entrapment. Though the point was—yes, the sad truth was—that the kid was angling for a way to jump into the very hole Prentiss was trying to crawl out of.
So tragic. Prentiss wanted to shake him real hard and say, It ain’t like that. It ain’t so easy you getting waylaid tonight and thinking it’s no big thing and all bets are off, all the pain disappeared and you get to feel like some street-corner prince put on earth to fuck and run. Booze is the long-term proposition. Booze sets up residence in you and in return it gets rid of the pain but that’s no fair trade, because the pain isn’t gone it’s just hiding, and while you’re in that limbo and your nerve endings don’t mean nothing, while nothing means nothing, your pain’s developing immunities so that when it comes back it’ll reintroduce itself and there ain’t no movie this scary so that you’re begging for mercy and it’s you down on your knees penitent, and you didn’t mean to let the pain get so big, honest, you were going to bring it back and work with it a little, treat it with respect and figure out what it’s got to teach you. But by then it’s too late. I’m saying, by then the clock’s run out and you can’t ever make a move on your own again. You’re its slave forever on a plantation as big as your mind.
But Prentiss didn’t say this. Instead he ran a black hand over his black face and turned to the kid and walked toward him and said, as gently as he could, “That’s not a good idea for either one of us.” The brightness of aisle 11 was practically blinding, and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafted out of the ceiling speakers, all dulcet tones and why-not-pick-up-some-extra-gum. The kid backed into and overturned a basket of limes and belligerently kicked one of the rolling green citruses and shuffled down the aisle and turned left and wasn’t overcome with the shakes. Prentiss longed to follow him.
This Monday was another gray day, and a cement truck at the corner of Fourteenth and C Streets was grinding the devil’s own bones. They should be handing out earplugs. Prentiss walked by it on his way back from A.J.’s Market, coughing the rising dust and wiggling his right big toe through a sock hole as he passed an old bird-looking dude he saw hanging around sometimes, not doing anything.
Prentiss was expected at the library in an hour and hadn’t taken a shower or had breakfast or done his stepping. The stepping was hard. Pulling an apple pie out of its crinkle wrapping as he entered the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Carl Frost, he took a bite and stared at the fresh copy of Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members sitting on the coffee table. He had no trouble with the first step: “We admit we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.” Wasn’t his totaled car, revoked driver’s license, broken collarbone, and $61,000 worth of structural damage to the Fortuna Doll Emporium building proof enough? And the job firings and estranged girlfriends and chronic fatigue? Damn straight, his life had become unmanageable because of alcohol. As plain as an overhead B-52. But the second step was turning out to be a real barrier in his path toward recovery: “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Now, who in their right mind is going to hand over the steering wheel toward recovery to some Power that might not exist? That was just irresponsible. Prentiss had gotten himself into alcoholism, and Prentiss was going to get himself out. Simple as that. And it was this same “Power” that had allowed every tragedy he could think of to happen, from slavery to the World Trade. Prentiss was supposed to trust his recovery to that? What’s the expression, you must be kidding.
“Prentiss, that you?” called out a voice from the bathroom.
“Me.”
“Could you do me a favor and bring me some paper towels?”
“We out of toilet paper?”
“Looks that way.”
“I wish I’d have known; I was just at A.J.’s.”
Prentiss stuffed the rest of the apple pie in his mouth and took a roll of paper towels to his roommate in the bathroom. “That’s a potent odor,” he said. “Makes my fruit pie taste bad.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, you got a problem there.”
“Mayday, mayday.”
“You owe me money.”
“I always owe you money.”
“You got to put it up front now or they’ll shut down the utilities.”
“We have flashlights.”
“The second due date is coming.”
“We can make fires in the garbage can.”
“Going to turn off the water and we won’t be able to flush your evil shit away.”
“I’ll build an outhouse.”
“Seventy-four dollars, Frost. Today. Seventy-four dollars.”
“But I have to pay Sadie when I see her tomorrow.”
“Who’s Sadie?”
“My therapist.”
“A man’s got to have priorities. Don’t make me look for a new roommate.”
Prentiss went to his room and got out one of his work sweaters, a downy V neck decorated with rows of off-center maple leaves. Pulled on the boots. Patted his two-inch Afro into an approximate square. Started walking across town to the clean, well-lit Humboldt County Library, where the books and movies kept piling up for his sorting pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, right. About as much pleasure as having your balls licked by a cat. A frazzle-haired woman pushing a stroller with no baby in it breezed past him when he crossed the street to the courthouse. He was going to be late. But for seven bucks an hour, did he care? True, the county had given him the job as an alternative to living in a halfway house, and he had to be grateful for the little bit of freedom this allowed him, though it was a chafed freedom, a liberty restricted to fighting his impulse to sit down with a gallon of red wine and let the good times roll. Oh, but it was all sour grapes these days.
Prentiss had been living with Frost for two years and considered him his only close sober friend, though they didn’t do much together besides watch TV and go to the flea market for the distinctive clothes Frost favored. Prentiss didn’t pretend to understand Frost, who in high school had chastised him for not being black enough—the irony of Frost’s being white didn’t seem to matter—but who lately had let slip a few race-is-irrelevant comments regarding affirmative action. Sometimes Prentiss stood in Frost’s room, which had a map theme going on—every square inch of wall space was covered by maps of the world, of Uganda and Estonia and East Timor, of small towns and big towns and mountain ranges and highway grids and famous buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, the Carter House)—for an effect that was like staring at someone’s brain circuitry. His own, maybe. There were stacks of National Geographic on the floor and piles of loud, colorful clothing on the bed and in the room’s corners, as well as newspaper clippings about car accidents. Prentiss would wonder at this cartographic nerve center and then gratefully return to his own, normal room.
The next morning he got up early to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so he poured himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen and was examining the toy mouse that came in the cereal package, when a strange woman walked in and let out a half-second scream.
Prentiss threw down the mouse and tried to see straight. “You a friend of Frost’s?”
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“Carl’s. You a friend? My name’s Prentiss. I was just settling down to some breakfast cereal and found this little Ziegfried the Marvelous Mouse toy come in the package.” He looked from her to the table. Frost never had women stay the night. As far as he knew, Frost didn’t know any women. “It isn’t a regular thing me examining a plastic mouse this early.”
“My name’s Justine. I just met—I mean, yes, I’m a friend of Carl’s. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” He looked at her and she stood there zipping her purse open and shut. “You want some toasted wheat biscuits?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”
“It’s back there in the hallway on your left. But at the moment we’re having a toilet paper shortage. I could offer you a paper towel.”
“That’s all right. I don’t live far from here. I can wait.”
“Suit yourself. But there’s nothing so urgent to me as the first pee of the day.”
“I don’t suppose you,” she said, staring nervously at the refrigerator and its magnetized poetry and clipped, careworn coupon. “I don’t—”
Prentiss looked at her in the weak morning light and she seemed about to say something before stopping, removing her hand from the purse, and walking out the door.
That afternoon, Silas Carlton was in the Bead Emporium, staring at rows and columns of bead drawers. He felt the paralysis of choice that struck him sometimes at the grocery store when he’d face seventy-two different breakfast cereals (he’d counted them during one of his twenty-minute stupefactions). There were too many alternatives. Ah, he’d think, give me a Soviet food line any day where I have to take whatever they’ve got. Unburden me of these decisions. By that logic he should have grabbed the nearest cereal and not bothered deliberating over the bran o’s and crispy muesli flakes and frosted chocolate nuggets, but he had preferences—he had tastes—and a bad selection would haunt him until he threw the cereal away and went back to the store, at which point the difficulty would begin again. Other people didn’t have this trouble and were quickly filling up plastic baggies with beads. No hesitation. A silver-haired saleswoman with thin gold-framed glasses sat on a stool holding a closed book of crossword puzzles and staring at him. Silas didn’t like people to pay attention to him while he shopped. Made him feel pressured, like he was being monitored and any deviation from standard browsing behavior—if he spent too long reading a label or talked to himself—would get him in trouble. As maybe it would.
He left the store without buying anything and felt a huge relief, like he’d resisted temptation, though all he’d done was fail to get a gift for his great-niece Lillith’s seventeenth birthday. He walked down and up the dip in Buhne Street—exacerbating but not making unbearable the pain in his knees—and turned left on Harrison and stopped in for a fountain-style soda at Lou’s Drugs.
Beto the Argentinian was at the counter with his long sideburns getting ever longer. He gently patted the stool next to him when Silas approached.
“Silas,” said Beto.
“Beto,” said Silas.
“It’s good for you to join us.”
Beto sat alone and no one was behind the fountain. The aisles of Lou’s were empty. The cashier was gone. The ceiling corners of the store were without security cameras.
“Where’s Lou and everybody?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you just get here?”
“Since two hours ago.”
“There hasn’t been anyone here in two hours?”
