Josh Emmons - The Loss of Leon Meed

“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.