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.”
