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Chapter One

Once, if you had driven north on Highway 101 from San
Francisco past its outlying bedroom communities and vineyards and hippie
enclaves, beyond blighted motels and one-pump gas station towns, over a road at
times so winding and mountain-clinging that a moment’s distraction could steer
you off a cliff and into freefall, you would have reached Eureka, the coastal
seat of Humboldt County in northern California. It was a city whose forty
thousand inhabitants faced the Pacific Ocean on one side and all of America on
the other. It sat between the deeps.

You might then have forgotten about it if you were continuing on to the
cities of consequence, to Portland or Seattle. Or to the windswept streets and
unspoiled air of Canada. Or to the North Pole. You might have been scaling the
planet and in no mood for its way stations.

But if you had stayed in Eureka, you would have discovered a weathered city
with an almost granular fog and a high cloud cover, with temperatures rarely
dipping below forty-five or climbing above seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit,
where tourists wondered how they’d slipped out of the California Dream. You
would have wondered this, too, if you had compared the steely sky and faded
architecture of Eureka with the sun and oceanfront villas of that dream. You
would have thought that something was wrong.

The thing about dreams, though, is that they’re products of the imagination,
and the imagination, like all engines of terror and transcendence, can do
anything.

On an afternoon in late November, the last of the school buses pulled away
and fourth-grade teacher Elaine Perry realized that she hadn’t asked any of her
students to clean the chalkboard erasers. She stood by the tetherball pole and
kicked a wood chip that sliced cleanly through the air and came to rest on the
edge of the playing field where earlier that day a third grader had broken his
leg. Children led dangerous, thrill-seeking lives. Spidering over jungle gyms,
roof climbing, bike racing, contact sports. They chose the reckless and
perilous, gravitated toward jeopardy and disaster. Adulthood is all about
repressing that instinct, Elaine thought as she stared at Muir Elementary
School’s main building, and learning to desire the predictable and
unthreatening. Principal Giaccone’s office window was open. She hated cleaning
the erasers and had been pleasantly surprised to learn when she began teaching
in September that her students loved it. Giaccone had stopped by her classroom
on the first day of school with a waxy red apple. “The forbidden fruit,” he’d
said, presenting it to her. “Only if it’s from a certain tree in Eden,” she’d
said, holding it up and reading its small white sticker: “This one comes from
Washington.” Giaccone smiled and said he hoped her students appreciated what a
clever teacher they were getting, that his own fourth-grade teacher, Miss
Costigan, in addition to being the only centenarian in his hometown, had been a
yearlong lesson in crotchetiness. Elaine caught the emphasis he gave to crotch
and thought, These silly flirtations. I can’t have an administrative fling. They
go so badly. I could lose my job. He could lose his. Not to mention our
respective families, my kids and hus – “Call me if you need anything,” Giaccone
said. “There should be a bullhorn in the supply closet.”

Elaine, wife and mother of two, from the town of Red Bluff seventy miles
away, graduate of Humboldt State University, hair straightener, I Ching dabbler,
and mystery novel consumer, did her job very well. In addition to teaching
twenty-three fourth graders, she supervised the chess club, directed the school
production of South Pacific, and ran the Gifted & Talented program. Her
husband, Greg, was having an affair with a nurse named Marlene who worked at the
hospital where he was an orthopedist. Elaine sometimes left her car beside the
grove of old-growth redwoods that bordered the Muir Elementary parking lot and
walked home past ranch-style houses painted the primary colors – red, blue,
yellow – in rigid, unbroken order. She sang “A Cock-Eyed Optimist” and tried to
mean it. In July her father had been discovered to have a meningioma, a tumor
growing out of the thin membrane covering his brain called the meninx, for which
he underwent an unsuccessful surgery and was currently in radiation therapy and
taking a battery of antiseizure medications that often made him forget what he
was doing. When Muir experienced budgetary cutbacks – “those pricks in
Sacramento,” Giaccone had fumed in a moment of faculty meeting impropriety –
Elaine learned that there might be layoffs of the last-hired-first-fired
variety. Her husband grew lazy in his excuses for arriving home past midnight –
“Honey, Steve might need me for an assist on a motorcycle wreck that just came
in, some kid whose femur is sticking out of his kneecap. Don’t wait up. Love
you” – which gave her the opportunity to single-handedly feed, wash, encourage,
and console their two children through their five- and nine-year-old growing
pains. She ordered an awesome nine-inch dildo from a mail order company in San
Francisco called Good Vibrations. South Pacific was a disaster. Two children,
siblings who played the French murderer and Bloody Mary with amazing vivacity,
were yanked out of school midway through rehearsals by their mother, then
seeking a divorce from their father, and the rest of the cast seemed hopelessly
far away from memorizing their lines – much less developing the wherewithal to
sing in public – in time for the mid-December opening night. She found blood in
her stool and was told by a gynecologist that she had an iron deficiency and
needed to rest more during menstruation. But she never slept beyond four hours a
night these days, reading macabre tales of murder and insurance fraud until her
husband came home, at which time she’d feign sleep until his loathsome, sexually
sated snore started up, and then she’d rise, fix herself a bologna sandwich, and
resume reading in the TV den.

As she was clapping erasers outside, Principal Giaccone poked his head
through the window and called down to her, “Elaine! Oh, Miss Perry! Could I see
you for a minute?” And she entered the building and climbed the stairs to the
first floor and knocked formally on his door and sat in front of him and
listened to his spiel about financial constraints and the necessity of letting
some top quality people go, and how he’d hate to have to do that to her, but how
he might have to unless, well, unless they came to an agreement. Giaccone stared
at a blank computer in front of him. Things have been building toward this, he
said, concentrating on the empty screen and then turning to smile complicitly at
her. His secretary had gone home and there was nobody else who could hear this
stab at sexual coercion. This grossest form of blackmail.

“Are you saying,” began Elaine, sliding her gaze from Giaccone to a picture
of him in a lineup shaking the governor’s hand, “that the only way I can keep my
job is if I fuck you?”

Giaccone exhaled loudly – he’d been holding his breath – “God no,” he lied.
“What gave you that? It’s just there are these extenuating circumstances, and
certain difficult decisions have to be made -”

But Elaine was already standing up and straightening her skirt before
reaching for the zipper along the side. “If that’s all it takes,” she said,
pulling down her underwear.

Giaccone got up and stepped forward as though to intervene or help. “Don’t be
that way,” he said. “I just thought you and I had this thing.”

Elaine unbuttoned her blouse and untucked Giaccone’s shirt. “We do. Lift up
your arms.”

“Look, you’re doing this out of anger or something. There’s nothing erotic
about this.”

“Of course there is. This is exactly how it works. Step out of your boxers.
And take off your watch. Men should never wear a watch when they have sex. It’s
too tempting for women to look at.” Elaine grabbed a tissue from the desk and
used it to pull out her tampon, which she dropped in the wastebasket.

“Come on,” said Giaccone, staring with embarrassment at the wastebasket. “I
didn’t know.”

“Now you do. Is this how you normally respond to naked women?” Elaine had
Giaccone’s flaccid penis in her hand. Massaging it just below its head and then,
as it grew and stiffened, stroking it up and down.

“Oh, yeah,” said Giaccone, coughing the words.

“Yeah. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

When Giaccone reached out to hold Elaine’s waist she caught his hand and
pushed him back onto the desk, and as he got bigger she climbed up and sat on
him and enfolded him.

“Oh, Jesus!” Giaccone cried out, stretching his hands over his head, pushing
documents and the phone off the desk, writhing like a merman caught in a fishing
net.

“You can’t bring him into it,” Elaine murmured. “He’s got nothing to do with
it.”

When it was over she dressed while he lay staring at the ceiling.

“That was -” he said. “You hate me, don’t you?”

Elaine opened the door and said, “I don’t hate anybody,” closing it behind
her. Down the hall she passed a wan twenty-something boy with thin blue hair
wearing headphones and pushing a mop over scarred linoleum. He smiled at her and
she smiled back, unable to gauge the innocence of the transaction, unable to
gauge the innocence of anything. Outside, music was playing and she began to
sing loudly, “I hear the human race/ Is falling on its face/ And hasn’t very far
to go,/ But ev’ry whippoorwill/ Is selling me a bill/ And telling me it just
ain’t so!”

“It just ain’t so,” she repeated to the trees and the cars and the houses and
herself. “It could be awful and degrading and it could be a conspiracy of evil,
but … but …” She let her voice fade to nothing and walked along as though
carried by the wind, and when she remembered to look up through the breaks in
the canopy of trees, the sky was a bright canary yellow.

Ten days later, at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Street, where Highway 101
hit the middle of its Eureka crawl, the night lights went off at the Pantry. It
was seven thirty in the morning, and Silas Carlton had been drinking coffee and
eating a Hungry Man Special for half an hour. He’d bought a Eureka
Times-Standard on his way to the diner and read about the timber industry’s
response to recent environmental activism. Both the article and the response
were badly constructed; key elements of each contained errors.

Silas raised his coffee cup in salute to Teri as she walked by with
orange-and-black-lidded coffeepots. He forgot which color meant decaffeinated
and which meant regular, a distinction he’d known all his life. Like the names
of friends and relatives that now escaped his immediate recall. Once familiar
objects that had become strange. Orange meant something.

“Silas,” said Teri, pausing in her white sneakers and shadowy stockings, “I
do declare I’ve never seen you ask for a third cup.”

“So you’ve turned into Scarlett O’Hara?” he said.

Teri smiled and refilled his cup and returned to the kitchen. The
Times-Standard weighed in at twenty-four pages – depressingly small for the
county’s largest newspaper. Silas read an article congratulating four county
natives for running the Boston Marathon, although none had placed even in the
top one thousand; an editorial explaining why the paper would discontinue its
Public Safety Log, listing significant arrests (no longer had the space); and an
Associated Press article about America’s zany love of meatless hot dogs. He
skimmed local sports stories that had larger headlines than bodies, wedding
announcements and syndicated comic strips and a company-profile “Who’s Who.”

He read more carefully when he got to the obituaries. These he appreciated.
These were a chance for Silas, age seventy-five, to see what others were dying
of and how and when and where. The details of death were increasingly
interesting to him, and not just because it was less “later when I’m old” and
more “any day now,” but because they seemed to come in two extreme varieties:
the mundane and the horrific. Either “peacefully asleep in the arms of her
husband of sixty years” or “shot in the head by a carjacker at the corner of H
Street and Buhne,” provoking a “she was a fine lady” or “what the hell is wrong
with this world?” Silas wondered how frequently there was a correlation between
one’s death and one’s life, whether the old woman’s peaceful stroke ended a life
of bone-deep righteousness or fantastic dissipation. And the carjack victim:
choir boy or Hell’s Angel? Did karma play any part in our end? Was poetic
justice mere poetry?

Silas’s life hadn’t been exemplary by certain standards, yet neither had it
been unforgivable. There were things of which he was proud: raising his former
wife’s diabetic son when she died and the boy’s father looked to be a slipshod
guardian; refusing Shell Oil’s filthy lucre in exchange for his approval of
their offshore oil drilling plan near Samoa; walking two miles in the middle of
the night to a suicidal friend’s house and convincing her that depression, like
happiness, was only temporary. As there was behavior of which he was ashamed:
sleeping with his best friends’ wives (three best friends, five wives); knocking
out a guy’s front teeth over a disputed game of pool; lying (to everyone, all
the time, with and without reason). Silas wondered how, if at all, these things
would affect his death.

He was a retired bike shop owner and former city councilman and often lonely.
His outspoken criticisms of Eureka’s budgetary priorities and the state of
America’s forests, which for many years had identified him in the community as
someone who thought about big issues, now made him a curmudgeon.

He was tall and skinny and had bad posture from years of hunching over desks
and trying not to be conspicuous around shorter people. Thick white hair shocked
out of his head like a woodpecker’s, giving his bony features an avian quality.
He wore sturdy black-framed glasses and black turtleneck sweaters like some
funky old beatnik Rip Van Winkling in the twenty-first century doing his best
Samuel Beckett impression and staring down the combined forces of illness,
fatigue, and moral collapse. Yet nobody noticed him these days as he walked
around Old Town and sat in coffee shops and listened and tried to eke out a
meaning to his days. He blended into the background as someone you’d seen a
thousand times but could never place from where. The social life now open to him
centered on his niece Rebecca’s family – he’d once been close to his
great-nieces Lillith and Maria – and chance encounters with people old enough to
remember him. Very few occasions for him to forget names, altogether too few.

His death would make these people sad, and the other obituary readers out
there would take note of it – perhaps like him they would speculate on its
justice – and it would bring his family together for a day or two of discussing
him fondly and resolving that life goes on. Silas’s sound and fury would be like
the other sounds and furies that had signified nothing. He would disappear.

He looked across the diner at two mustachioed truck drivers – noted the
grossly obtruding bellies over scrawny legs and the padded nylon vests and the
feet that knew how to maintain 65 mph for several uninterrupted weeks – who hit
each other lightly on the shoulder with the backs of their hands to emphasize a
point or command a laugh-along. Touching someone makes them your friend. Silas
recognized one of the men and miraculously remembered his name, Shannon
Koslowski, whose father, Pete, had led the move to price-fix dairy products in
the area thirty years earlier. Pete died two weeks ago. Aneurysm. Making an
omelet.

Glancing down at the paper, Silas noticed a small box beneath the obituaries
that said “MISSING: Leon Meed, of 427 Neeland Dr. Last seen on December 1. Age
54, medium height, curly brown hair. Any information, please call 555/2471.”

I’d rather go missing than die, Silas thought to himself. When you’re missing
you still have a chance.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from The Loss of Leon Meed by Josh
Emmons Copyright 漏 2005 by Josh Emmons. Excerpted by permission.
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rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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