The Loss of Leon Meed

“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

“Jim!” said Shane. The third annual Boys in the Wood racquetball tournament was in midcontest at CalCourts, where Shane Larson and Jim Sturges stood next to each other in line to get shower towels from the front desk. Broad-bottomed women in stretch pants and sports bras strode purposefully to their aerobics workouts and weight-diminishing sauna sessions. Their thighs and hair were massive. Televisions tuned to different twenty-four-hour sports channels perched on all four walls like bird nests, a permanent squawk, competing for the attention of exercisers and exercise-hangers-on standing below, where the semifinals of the racquetball C division were about to begin on courts 3, 4, and 5, and the judges were being asked over the PA system to take their positions in the observation areas. “Man,” said Shane, raising his voice a chirpy octave, “it’s been forever. Where are you living these days? I’m married, did you know that?”

Shane was a changed man. He knew Jim would be expecting the old Shane: the Shane with skinhead leanings who sometimes beat up middle-aged men with families just because they were middle-aged men with families, the Shane who’d once dropped seven hits of acid and baseball-batted his way into a Rolls-Royce parked implausibly in downtown Eureka in order to defecate on its virgin-calf leather upholstery before being arrested. But eight transformational years had passed since they’d seen each other, during which Shane had embraced his family’s Mormonism, the Larson faith for three generations already, and become an upstanding citizen.

“I didn’t know that,” said Jim, smiling mechanically. “Congratulations.”

He has no idea how far I’ve come, thought Shane, who dispensed with the small talk by saying, “I’ve stopped drinking and smoking and extramarital sex.” He stared penetratingly at his old friend. “Those were a fool’s paradise.”

“I see,” Jim said.

But did Jim see? Could he comprehend the metamorphosis? He’d never been as ultraviolent and antisocial as Shane, and in fact he’d been something of a wet blanket about fighting and unprovoked cruelty back in high school, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been a sinner. Because he had. Jim had fornicated with abandon. He’d drunk alcohol to the point of bodily harm. He’d had godless ways. And although time could also have changed him, Shane didn’t think it had. No, Shane didn’t see salvation in Jim’s tired, distracted face.

Shane said, “I’m working now for Morland Memorial Services. It’s customer relations, some floor sales. I’m selling caskets mainly, but recently I’ve been getting contracts to do land plots. It’s a growth industry. The baby boomers are nearing their time. What’d you say you’re doing?”

Jim got his towel from the putty-chinned receptionist and gave it a quick inspection. “I’m in Los Angeles. Just home visiting for a while.”

Shane tried not to think about Jim’s inability to appreciate how far he’d come since they’d known each other in high school—because it was a major failure of imagination—and instead he thought about the business opportunity presenting itself. Let the past be the past. His great insight was: friends and acquaintances could be customers, and vice versa. “I know what you’re probably thinking in LA,” he said. “You’re probably worried because you have no idea where to be buried in such a huge city, right? I mean, down there where you don’t know anybody and everything’s so anonymous. It’d scare me to death if I was you.”

Jim stared in the direction of the change room and said, “Honestly I haven’t thought about it.”

Shane tucked his towel under his arm. “That’s what I’m saying. Why would you when the thought’s so scary? Being buried in some big city all alone? Jim, you’re going to want to come back to Eureka when you die, where your roots are. I think we should talk about this; I think it could be good for us. How long are you in town?”

Jim pivoted on one foot, his body aching toward the showers. “Not long,” he said.

“Let me give you my card.” Shane pulled out a buttermilk business card with blue embossed lettering: Shane Larson, Associate Sales Representative, Morland Memorial Services, 555-2432. “What’s your number in town? I’ll call you.”

“Actually I’m busy for the rest of my visit, so I’ll have to get ahold of you later.”

Shane, knowing that Jim hadn’t a clue how to conduct himself righteously in the eyes of God, that he was, spiritually speaking, a directionless person in need of guidance, said, “I have a better idea. We’ll talk it over in the shower. I can get you a great price on a site right now. You like the Humboldt Overview Cemetery? Who doesn’t, right? Imagine a place on the hill there, overlooking the bay, in a gorgeous casket made of beautifully contrasting white pine and mahogany, and with a crisp gold satin lining. Think solid mahogany swing-bar handles and sliding lid supports. Jim, I could take you down to the store after we shower and show you the displays and we could settle this today. Can you imagine how good you’d feel?”

Shane was really in the zone now, was in one of his total empathic mind melds, for despite his religious advantage over his erstwhile friend, he was Jim Sturges at that moment, seeing what he saw, anticipating the relief of putting the whole burial question to rest and maybe opening himself up to a higher power.

“Thanks,” Jim said, “but I really don’t have time.”

“It isn’t for me that I’m asking this. It’s for you.”

“I’m sure it is, but seriously. I’m not interested.”

Shane closed the gap between them by six inches and spoke quietly, confidentially, importantly, as sports commentators droned in the background, “Jim, death isn’t one of those things you can afford not to think about. You may want to, and you may get away with it in the short term, but it’s there waiting for you. I don’t know if you know this but I’ve become a Mormon, and that’s because I had a big realization a few years ago that we’re not here forever. I know what you’re thinking, news flash, right?” Brief chuckle and then po-face. “But it had never really come home to me before I was in my car driving along and I heard on the radio about a guy down in Matole who ran out into the street to get his son’s basketball and was hit by a car. Died on the spot. And I got to thinking, I don’t know why, it was just pressing on my mind, but I began to think about what it meant to run into the street to get a basketball, a reflex motion, your mind on what’s for dinner and how it’s time to mow the lawn again and a new soreness in your left knee, when wham! you’re dead. You don’t see it coming even though you know it has to eventually. Death is an invisible speeding train and you’re standing on the track somewhere, you don’t know where exactly, could be far down by the river or could be two feet away. It comes back to we all have to go sometime. And where we go depends on what we choose to do while we’re on this planet. You need to ask yourself. The soul and the body. Have you planned for them? You can either take out insurance—and we’re talking a tiny premium, month by month you won’t even feel it except as a feeling of comfort and security—so that you know you’re covered, or you can be a miser and end up rotting in the ground in some anonymous city with your soul burning forever.”

Shane had never expressed it so eloquently. He’d linked—pull the metal chain, feel its strength—his own personal epiphany with burial services and the afterlife. This matter of supreme importance—this primary undergirding—made him both vulnerable to scorn—people always sneered at the truth tellers, for guilty consciences are drowned out by nothing so well as jeers and ridicule—and strangely confident. After all, Shane was only human, he was an insignificant mortal, but the magnitude of God and of his duty to Him were commensurate. Shane was conjuring the infinite, evoking the ineffable. He felt measurable in joules. To decorate His crown.

Jim draped the towel around his neck and crossed his arms—what a tell! what a giveaway that he took this seriously and felt implicated!—and said, “I don’t want to offend you, and I’m sure your death episode was the real thing, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. When I die I’m going to donate all my organs and be cremated. But I appreciate what you’ve said and I’m going to leave now. Good to see you again.”

Jim walked away and Shane stared after him. How can anyone be so tone deaf? Obstinacy is what it is. Denial. People’s hearts get hard. They refuse to see anything but their own version of things. Sad, really. Sad.

So sad that the more Shane stood there thinking about it, as bruised racquetball players filed past him to get towels and chat with the counterwoman and buy a compensatory light beer, the angrier he got, like who the fuck do these people think they are? They’re handed truth on a platter and do they accept it graciously, maybe even appreciatively because after all it is their immortal soul that’s in question, I mean excuse me for trying to save you from the eternal fire, or do they refuse the platter and say, No thanks, I’m not in the mood? Not in the mood? I don’t want to offend you blah blah blah, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. Doesn’t resonate? Like faith is some kind of bell that you ring and if it doesn’t produce the right echo, you put cotton in your ears and head for the hills? I’m going to leave now. And did you see Jim’s face when he said that, with that left-lip sneer that was part disrespect and part you’re-a-nutcase-who-has-to-be-handled-delicately-or-you’ll-detonate? It was so condescending, and who was Jim anyway but some nowhere man living in LA and thinking that he was cool enough to dismiss what was most fundamental as pure hokum? Like, Save your fairy tale for the local rubes who don’t know better.

Shane’s fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms and he felt heavy and congested. He hadn’t had an alcoholic drink in four years. He turned to the counter and ordered a Budweiser. His wife, Lenora, was walking around Old Town in Eureka with her parents, who were visiting from Salt Lake City for a week, getting ice cream at Bon Boniere and trying on Celtic outfits at the Irish Shoppe that he would be angry if she bought. They pooled their finances now, which basically meant that Shane paid for everything since he was the only one with a job. He finished his beer and, an old habit rising from the murk of memory, squashed it into a thin disk on his right leg. I appreciate what you’ve said and I’m going to leave now. What a patronizing son of a bitch.

“Hey,” he said, addressing the counterwoman, “I need another one, on my tab.”

“You know we send an itemized bill, don’t you?”

“You think my wife pays the bills?”

“Just thought I’d mention it.”

It was like he’d never been away. After four more beers Shane was feeling the old body carbonation, like there were air pockets in him rising, making him a light and humming creature, clearing his brain and his vision and the space between him and any challengers out there. I’m sure your death episode was the real thing, but monotheism doesn’t resonate for me. Shane laughed and ran a hand through his short black hair, exposing its advanced widow’s peak. He rubbed his beak-shaped nose. Did Jim think he could treat Shane like a fool and then no hard feelings? Whoops, didn’t mean to shit all over your most sacredly held beliefs, see you around. Shane stacked the five aluminum disks on the counter and walked toward the showers. Pushed through the swing doors and into the steam of the locker room. A bunch of bald fat fucks sitting astride padded benches talking about you should have heard what counsel for the defense wanted to plea bargain with, and I was netting sixty a year on property speculation in Tahoe until the county increased regulations on undeveloped land that was more than thirty percent forested. Shane passed them by and stepped on the bare foot of a lobster-faced man resting his elbows on his knees, and when the man yelped in pain Shane told him to shut the fuck up. He was six foot four and his muscles were so toned and there was so much strength in his every sinew every atom and he was so light he could just fly up to some obstacle and overpower it yes because he was energy he was forward momentum and woe unto him who denies the truth and that’s what that fucker Jim was he was a truth denier and it was people like him who kept the whole world from achieving peace and brotherly love and the fruits promised the human race by a benevolent God. One bad apple. Past the sinks and the weigh scales and the towel closet, through more swinging doors and Shane was unswervingly determined, like a Tomahawk missile, to find his target. But Jim wasn’t in the showers or the saunas or the hot tub and Shane checked everywhere twice and he was forward momentum.