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“The mayor was here a minute ago,” said Soulbrother, “to bestow his blessing.”
“It was a bestowal,” agreed Alleycat.
“Said the city council has penned a letter to Congressman Sawyer demanding that the oil scouts be held in abeyance.” Soulbrother wore a nest of Ugandan bead necklaces and held a jade-tipped staff in his left hand. Alleycat also had a staff, though his was a weathered piece of driftwood without ornamentation.
“Until it can be proven that the black brant doesn’t nest in the sound.”
“Except that everyone knows it does, so we’ll get a permanent abeyance.”
“It’s crafty and it’s just.”
“The fate of the Pacific black brant is intricately tied to the fate of California itself,” the woman with the microphone was saying. “If we allow its natural habitat to be torn up so Big Oil can come in and bleed the ocean for a few more years of gas dependency, what’ll we have? We’ll have a displaced black brant, which might just be an extinct black brant, and a wounded Humboldt Sound and further retardation of alternative energy research. Will the problem of California’s energy needs be solved by however many millions of barrels of crude oil can be pumped out of our ocean? Of course not. There are far too many of us, and our needs are too great. All we’ll have as a result is a permanently impaired ecosystem.” She paused and looked searchingly at the crowd and someone made a low moaning noise. “Does anyone remember the Bligh Reef in the upper Prince William Sound, where Exxon spilled eleven million gallons of oil in 1989? While efforts to clean it up succeeded in some ways, there were still vestiges left over a decade later, in areas sheltered from weathering processes, such as in the subsurface under selected gravel shorelines, and in some soft substrates containing peat.” A quick scan of the people around Joon-sup showed how unacceptable this was. Peat in the soft substrates? She might as well have been describing child pornography.
Joon-sup clasped his shaking hands behind his back and declined Alleycat and Soulbrother’s suggestion that he get his own staff and join them for a walk through Arcata Park with some pot and a ukulele.
Earlier that day, Eve Sieber applied a darker shade of black lipstick than normal and wandered the aisles of Bonanza 88, noting how little effect the blue-light special on cutlery was having on the store’s business. Despite the ad in the Times-Standard, potentially seen by over forty thousand people countywide, no one was thronging into the place to snatch up low-grade knives and forks and serving salad prongs. Was Eve surprised? No. The metal was cheap and flimsy. The spoons looked likely to bend under the strain of a bite of minute rice, and the forks were too small to provide the fulsome bites of steak and pasta that Eureka’s bargain hunters demanded. Even with prices slashed below cost—and what a minor bloodbath it was—this sale barely competed with the deep-discount chain stores that, because of their size and intimacy with manufacturers, could afford to sell everything at the leanest rates.
Eve returned to the cash register and tried to figure out if she had a cavity in one of her upper left molars and organized the open box of chocolate eggs meant to be irresistible to women in the checkout line. Her manager, Vikram, was hanging a perforated-edged WARNING: GREAT SAVINGS HERE! sign over the cutlery display, a warning unheeded by the four customers listlessly examining paper cups and Limoges Nativity scenes. Vikram was a tall man with movie-star cheekbones and elephantine ears who’d moved to Eureka the previous year to work at a newly opened software development plant but was fired when the company’s abysmal third-quarter earnings report led to layoffs of fifty percent of its employees. Vikram, by then in love with a shaggy-haired lesbian named Callie who worked at a travel store called Going Places, decided not to return to the Bay Area and instead to concentrate all of his psychological and romantic powers on winning Callie’s affection. He described his life as an act of radical romanticism.
“Hey you!” Vikram said to Eve. “Could you do me the kindness to please bring two fishhooks here?”
Eve dug into the display supply box stashed under the checkout counter and brought them to Vikram. “We’re never going to sell all these cutlery sets,” she said, straightening a stack of boxes. “There’s forty more in the back.”
“Forty-four,” he corrected her.
“So much the worse.”
“That is the wrong attitude to have toward this fine Millennium Dreams Cutlery Set. In Gujurat we’d kill to get such inimitable craftsmanship, such loving attention to detail.” Holding up a tarnished knife so flimsy that it almost wobbled, he whispered, “Such a bonanza of practical value.”
The two of them laughed. Making fun of Bonanza 88’s wares was among their favorite activities, though it usually led to an existential despondency—after all, they did nothing all day but sell these wares—from which they didn’t fully recover until the end of the day.
“Do you know the bar Callie goes to, the Pleather Principle?” Vikram asked.
“I haven’t been in it. Why?”
“The man who goes there might have an opportunity of knowing her in a more congenial setting than the Going Places.”
“It’s a lesbian bar.”
“My point exactly.”
“So men aren’t welcome.”
“What if the man looks like a woman?”
“You’d never get away with it and you’d end up humiliated. Maybe even beaten up by some hardcore bull dykes.”
Vikram folded up the step ladder he’d used to hang the sign. “You’re right. You see some things so clearly.”
At lunch Eve went to the back office to use the phone. She had a responsibility as an adult to alert the police about the man she’d met at the Fricatash—not that the police were her or her friends’ most trusted allies, but she acknowledged their authority in certain matters—and so called the sheriff’s office. She was put on hold for twenty valuable lunch-break minutes, at which point she talked to an Officer Fuller, who took her statement and thanked her for the interesting information regarding the Leon Meed missing person case.
“What happens now?” Eve asked.
“With what?” Officer Fuller responded.
“Do I need to identify him or something?”
“He’s not a criminal suspect.”
“I know, but you don’t need me to do anything else?”
“We’ll be in contact if we do.”
After this disappointing act of public service—she’d imagined being enlisted by the police as a consultant—Eve told Vikram she needed a longer lunch hour and then went to Amigas Burrito and talked to burrito maker Aaron Hormel, a primped skater she’d slept with when she was thirteen who now took occasional biology classes at College of the Redwoods and taught himself bass guitar and was someday going to move to Oakland and become either a veterinarian or a musician god. He’d been struck in the throat by a baseball bat in high school and suffered critical injuries to his vocal cords, so that he always sounded like he was breathing in while talking.
“Where’s Ryan these days?” Aaron asked. “I haven’t seen him at the Fricatash.”
“Working at Muir as much as possible where—ooh, listen to this. So last week Principal Giaccone catches him doing junk in one of the bathroom stalls, he was passed out for just a moment, and Giaccone starts fulminating about—”
“Nice word.”
“Thanks. So Giaccone was all, ‘This is a school, godammit you little junkie! You can’t be shooting up when kids are right outside playing basketball. What kind of place do you take this for? How long have you been working at Muir? I think it’s time we reevaluated the desirability of your being here.’”
Aaron sprinkled cilantro onto a Veggie Behemoth burrito. “Did he get fired?”
“It turns out,” Eve said, filling her cup with root beer, “that Ryan had walked by Giaccone’s office the week before and heard him sexually blackmail a fourth-grade teacher, saying, ‘You want to keep your job you’re going to have to fuck me.’”
“No way.”
“So Ryan mentioned what he’d heard and now his job is like lifetime guaranteed with a rosy little raise to boot. We’re going to save up and move to Bel Air.”
“That’s so corrupt. Of Giaccone, I mean. Who was the teacher?”
“I don’t know. Someone new.”
“I used to want to fuck my fourth-grade teacher.”
“Must be something about the job.”
When Eve drove to Arcata after work she almost hit a van in front of her that braked in the middle of the road for no reason, and she was so flustered she didn’t even think to honk and shout about what a stupid fucking reckless bastard its driver was. Saved her voice a workout. In Arcata she sat with Skeletor and Mike Mendoza on the Plaza and there was a political rally going on with some preachy woman and screechy loudspeakers so the three of them left to play billiards at a bar until Ryan joined them and they all did heroin in the basement storage room. All except Eve, who said to Ryan before they started, “After last night do you think you should be doing this?”
“Last night was what, was nothing.” Ryan scanned his arm for usable veins, but they lurked below the surface with Loch Ness Monster furtiveness and he had to then strain his neck muscles to draw out an artery. It was horrible to look at. When he was done Skeletor tied off and shot up and Eve turned away.
“You went to the hospital,” she said.
“I’m fine,” said Ryan. “Don’t be a worrywart.”
Everyone smiled at the word “worrywart,” including Eve, though for her it was a cover-up for feeling impotent and square and abandoned in the Old World by Ryan, who had crossed a chemical Bering Strait without her and was never coming back. And yet he, although gaunt and reluctant to look at her for any duration, knowing that their looks bespoke an intimacy out of place in the new scheme of things, was still the boy she’d once held on to for support and love and camaraderie, was still someone she had all this history with. All this immutable past. For in the beginning, before sex, when they used to meet in a rush before math class so he could copy her homework, his eyelashes impossibly long, the pencil eraser with which he poked her in play, the friends who couldn’t distract him, his fingers grazing hers as they breathlessly reached for the classroom door, there had been a grander understanding than any she had thought possible. The kind found in storybooks. The kind found in pop songs. What was now but the lie of happily ever after, the emptiness of I’ll always love you, and what could she do but act as though it weren’t the saddest dissemblance imaginable?
“Worrywart, okay,” she said, “but going to the hospital is serious.”
Ryan was already melting with Skeletor and Mike into a bed of broken-down cardboard boxes as soft as fur, the three of them there in body but not in mind, placid and imperturbable expressions on their faces. Eve thought it was like a drink before the war, a decision by them to forget tomorrow’s difficulties and instead to live in the moment by escaping it. Eve thought it was a way of disappearing and she would, if she could, give anything to keep Ryan from that fate.
That afternoon in Eureka, Lillith got on the bus after her McDonald’s shift ended. She stared out the window until a man in a fishing vest sitting across from her asked for the time. The bus pulled up to a stop at Seventh and J. There was nothing behind the plastic bus shelter but a barren lot on which even crabgrass was having a hard go of it. A large black man climbed on board, scuffing the corrugated floor with his boots, and funneled change into the fare machine that made a satisfying burp when it tallied up a dollar. The black man sat behind Lillith and softly whistled “Greensleeves,” which was odd to hear on a bus and very pleasing. Despite its lacking neopagan or even pagan connotations, it evoked for her a pastoral world in which there was a place for magic.
“You ride the bus a lot?” the fisherman asked her, for he was one of those guys who made conversation. Like it was his trade and he felt a professional obligation to talk to everyone about anything, though Lillith knew he did it not out of duty but because of a need to feel comfortable around strangers and because of a certain restlessness that drives people to reach out. She understood the impulse; she was often uncomfortable and wanted to be extroverted and would have said things like “You ride the bus a lot?” if she could.
“No,” said Lillith, who was in her McDonald’s clothes and aware of how alien they made her—uniformed people away from their jobs always seemed displaced and slightly suspicious, like escaped prisoners—“but today no one would give me a ride when my shift ended.”
“The bus’s not like it used to be. Doesn’t give veteran discounts and doesn’t go out on Cutten Road anymore.”
“Yeah, it does,” said the black man, who’d stopped whistling. “I’m going to Cutten right now.”
The fisherman leaned to the left so that he could see past Lillith to the black man. “Don’t you go to my AA meeting?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen you there in a while,” the black man replied.
The fisherman said, “I’m on a rickety wagon. Keeps throwing me off.” The black man didn’t smile. “But I’ll get back on. Scout’s honor.”
Lillith gazed out the window at the passing Memorial Building with outdated MIA and Bring-Back-the-POWs posters and, at the end of Lincoln Street, Eureka High School, where she was in her junior year, though she could be a graduate student it felt like she’d been there so long. A beautiful man boarded the bus and sat in a window seat where Lillith saw him in profile, the slender eyebrows and golden skin and strawberry mouth. He had a thin white scar on his temple and messy brown hair. She coughed loudly and he didn’t look her way. She knew she wasn’t in his league, but still it would have been nice to see him head on. Life was a million desires unrequited. And Sam. Sam wasn’t worth her obsession given how many options she had; really Sam was just a terrorist who’d taken her thoughts hostage and wouldn’t let them go, had even stopped negotiating for them, had cut off all communication and gone underground and so where could she begin to track them down? It was a crisis, but crises passed.
“Take care now,” said the fisherman when she got up to disembark.
At home her sister Maria was on the phone and she had to wait two hours before being able to check her messages: Tina and Franklin and still no Sam and this was the absolutely last day she would accept him so he was throwing away a chance at immense happiness. Whatthefuckever. Tina was waitressing at the Red Lion Inn lounge when Lillith called her house and got into the stupid nitpicking conversation with Tina’s brother about when she was going to give him free stuff at McDonald’s. Then she called Franklin, who told her that he and she and Tina needed to talk about the Wiccan convocation from the night before, that she wasn’t going to believe what had happened. Twenty minutes later he picked her up and they drove to the Red Lion Inn with the car almost dying at every stoplight, Franklin putting his hand on the dashboard in a faith healing gesture.
They walked in and Tina waved at them from where she stood distributing beers to a table of six white-shirted guys near a television broadcasting the prize fight out of Las Vegas. The television was muted with closed-caption subtitles for the hearing impaired. The white-shirted guys studiously read the black-outlined words scrolling across the bottom of the screen, their faces like stock traders’ in the Pit when the markets rumble, and then shouted their agreement or disagreement or bafflement at how the commentators could say something so stupid about such a clear punch, and then went back to reading and beer drinking.
“Who are those people?” asked Lillith when Tina came over on a two-minute break to sit with her and Franklin.
“The kitchen staff of Shanghai-Lo. They come for pay-per-view stuff.”
“None of them are Chinese.”
“Shanghai-Lo isn’t so authentic. They get all their recipes from a 1960’s edition of The Joy of Oriental Cooking. I’d never go again if I didn’t love their fried wontons.”
“Those are good,” said Lillith.
“So what are you guys doing here?”
Franklin said, “I have to tell you about last night’s convocation.”
“He’s being mysterious about it,” said Lillith. “On the ride over he didn’t say anything. And I begged.”
“You didn’t offer me a blow job.”
“There’d have to be something for me to blow.”
Franklin smirked and tapped his thumbs together and said, “So we start off at the convocation talking about the RenFair next month and this ayurvedic bookstore opening in Arcata and how there’ve been more attacks on neopagans in Kansas, and then Kathy stands up and she’s in full effect with the sequin gown and the sapphire rings and the head wrap and she looks, you know, the complete sorceress, like she’s ready to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms out of a glass of water, and she makes this speech about how a local guy named Leon Meed is on the Astral Plane right now, as in at this very second he’s over there with the Goddess and the Horned Consort and all the spirits.”
“What do you mean on the Astral Plane?” asked Tina. “A live person?”
“She says he’s been there for a week.”
“How would a live person get to the Astral Plane?”
“Kathy thinks the Horned Consort took him. The guy is a burl sculptor, and she says the Horned Consort fell in love with his statues and kidnapped him. She says she doesn’t know for sure how it happened. But what’s even more bogus is that Kathy thinks the guy is going back and forth between here and the Astral Plane. Then she challenges us to come up with a spell to bring him back. She gives it to us as an assignment, like we’re her students or something.”
“And then someone put her in a straitjacket?” asked Tina.
“You know how people never confront Kathy. And the thing is, a guy named Leon Meed really did go missing last week—there’s a police investigation—and people have reported seeing him since then, which according to Kathy is proof positive.”
“She gives witches a bad name.”
“We just sat there when she was done explaining it. She wants to have a special meeting on Sunday to talk about our strategy for rescuing this guy.”
Tina waved at her manager, who was pointing a finger at his watch from behind the bar, and mouthed “I know I know” and said, “I’ve got to get back to work. Maybe we should find a way to excommunicate her, if she’s going to keep saying such dumb things.”
“It’s not dumb,” said Lillith quietly.
“What?” said Tina.
“It’s not dumb. I’ve seen him.”
“Seen who?” said Franklin.
“The guy who disappeared, Leon Meed. At a show at the Fricatash last Friday. He was talking to that girl Eve you know she’s going out with Ryan Burghese? and then he disappeared.” As Lillith said this she looked at the table in front of her and saw an ampersand crack in the table’s surface.
Tina waved her white dish towel at her manager like a peace offering and stood up. “Very funny. I’ll see you later.”
Lillith didn’t indicate in any way that she was joking, and when Tina left Franklin said, “You’re not serious.”
“I am. You can not believe me but I saw him. And if other neopagans are saying that Leon’s on the Astral Plane, then that makes sense to me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before now?”
“I thought it was because I was drinking. I thought, I don’t know what I thought. But the point is we’ve got to help bring him back if that’s what Kathy’s saying. We’ve got to cast the spell.”
“You’re becoming a Wicca fundamentalist.”
“No, I’m not.”
Franklin said, “Hmm.”
Lillith said, “Hmm.”
Then they smiled and they’d been best friends since they were five-year-olds and there were some things that they instantly forgave in each other.
4 (#u0d8a8110-faf2-5d7f-a0e7-971b457b91fa)
