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