to find that wouldn’t frighten her beyond comprehension? Eventually nothing more could be said or done.
It never snowed in Eureka. Too close to sea level—it was sea level—so when Eve Sieber woke up to see her car covered in snow she told herself she was still dreaming. Which wasn’t true. When you’re awake you know it, and you only say you’re still dreaming in order to make a rhetorical point about the strangeness you’re witnessing. Fine, so she was awake, but the snow was nevertheless unusual. Must have been the New Weather. The snows of Kilimanjaro were melting, the polar ice mass was decreasing, the average temperature of southern California had risen two degrees over the last twenty years. Why not snow in Eureka? Why not tempests and tsunamis and terrorific tornadoes? This was a meteorological paradigm shift, and Eve was ready for it.
In the small aqua-tinted kitchen her caffetiere melded together tap water and coarsely ground Peruvian Blend coffee. A city-owned truck cruised slowly past her building as two men shoveled salt directly onto the snow-laden street. Shouldn’t they have plowed the street first? Eve stared at the caffetiere and touched the side of its glass briefly—hot as a fire poker, not that she’d know from personal experience—and then stumbled into the bathroom. Diarrhea was a horrible feeling. She’d gained a pound by the time she was done on the toilet, mysteriously. Is the scale broken? She took a shower and stroked her sore nipples—Ryan had really gone infantile on her last night, nursing on her breasts with the suction vehemence of a cartoon baby One-Tooth, then insisting she tie knots in a handkerchief and stick it up his ass during sex with the instruction to pull it out when he came—and shaved her legs. She was as into experimentation as the next girl—hadn’t the handkerchief been her suggestion?—but she had to worry now about them getting to a stage where normal sex—the old boy/girl in-out—would no longer appeal to her or Ryan. She loved him, or thought she did, which could be the same thing, but their tastes were doomed to become so extreme that eventually death would be their only unexplored sexual aide, and with mutual asphyxiation already behind them—last week, silk stockings, bed knobs and broomsticks—death might not be so far away. Think of what she’d leave behind: her shitty job at Bonanza 88 selling key rings and discount chocolate bars to large, prematurely aged women and their hordes of children. So many kids and such harried women and such sad interest in cheap imitation-brand clothing, not bought for durability or style but for sheer economy. The women didn’t smile, and they were always alone with their kids. If a man was present, some errant father hauled in by the alimony police, he was so obviously just-released from a halfway house, detoxed and pathetically unable to focus on any object long enough to pick it up, that Eve had to think, Why do they take these losers back? This woman here at the register is grim and overworked and I’d hate to be her, but can it possibly be better when that brandied moron is around? Yet Eve knew that the only thing separating her from these women was ten years. Or five. She was twenty-three and still childless and not unattractive—with soft blue eyes and clean high cheekbones, she had, for Eureka, an almost otherworldly beauty—but she’d gotten to the point where she didn’t lie to herself anymore and imagine a glorious future of fame and financial sanguinity. That wasn’t in the cards. Her pair of deuces was the janitor at Muir Elementary School, whose junk habit was quickly getting beyond anyone’s control, and whose celebrated love technique was turning into the kind of thing Houdini would have done if he were irreparably stoned and scatological. So much for the promise of youth. So, so much.
Eve put on a torn zip-up ski suit and a pair of moon boots—God, she looked weird—and kicked some clothes and magazines into a corner of the cramped living room. Then she left her two-story apartment building, a gray stucco edifice sandwiched on both sides by single-family homes, and walked to Sequoia Park, where the redwoods were impassively flecked with snow. The old stalwarts, never fazed, never in the least betraying anxiety, not even when the deafening chainsaw buzz finished and they were given a colossal nudge in one direction and fell, fell, were felled. She ripped off a piece of bark and brandished it like a sword, making Zorro curlicues in the air, stabbing at invisible enemies, sidestepping their retaliatory jabs. Touché! She won, for now, her imaginary battle.
Later that evening, in Old Town Eureka, at the Fricatash Club, Eve sat with an energy drink and a carton of cigarettes given to her by Ryan for safekeeping while he visited a self-taught chemist who was said to be doing exciting new things with crystal meth. Eve had come straight from work and so wore a pink short-sleeved shirt with her name stitched over her left breast in a luxurious cursive and the Bonanza 88 logo patched over her right breast. It was hot in the Fricatash and she worried that the black hair dye she’d accidentally gotten on her scalp earlier that morning would smudge down her forehead, half hidden by bangs, when she danced. And had she scrubbed the bathroom sink thoroughly enough that the dye wouldn’t permanently stain it? The show tonight, consisting of four moon-faced bands, was to raise money for the skate park that the City of Eureka had just decided not to build. Eve loved one of the bands, Derivative, and got increasingly excited sitting there with her medicinally caffeinated drink and two hundred cigarettes. Would they be fined by their landlord for the sink’s later cleaning or replacement? Did she even need to ask?
“Eve, you have all those cigarettes.” Skeletor plopped down at her table like a kid late for dinner. He was lanky, he was all lank. Arms and legs like a stick figure’s. Pure bone. Bony knees and elbows and shoulders. Big green eyes like they’d glow in the dark. A rictus for a mouth. You saw his jaw move independently of his skull. The guy was a walking X ray. “Since when can you afford a whole carton?”
“They’re Ryan’s.”
“Since when can he afford?”
“Yeah,” Eve said with mock curiosity, “I wonder how much he paid for them.”
“You mean with or without tax.” Skeletor gave a total-gum smile and you swore his skin was going to peel away. “I’d kill for a smoke right now.”
“I can’t break the packing seal. Wait’ll Ryan gets here.”
A concealed-disappointment: “Okay.”
“When’s Derivative playing?”
“Later.”
“Could you be less specific, please?”
“Later or maybe earlier.”
“And to think I used to tell people you weren’t retarded.”
“You’re developing the potential to be a real bitch.”
“I thought I was a cunt already. You said so last week.”
“Whatever. Let’s play dominoes.”
“They put away the set.”
“But it’s not eight yet.”
“Yeah, well, go tell it on the mountain.”
Skeletor leaned back on the park bench that the Fricatash supplied instead of chairs at its tables and surveyed the crowd of sixty Crayola-headed Eureka cool kids of death. No music played and so they stumbled around on their own, borrowing money from each other. The ones not too stoned to converse conversed; the others made sounds in code, using the same low register “ahhhh” to mean I’m-hungry and isn’t-she-hot and I’ve-gotta-sit-down-for-a-minute and when’s-this-gonna-start and I-read-the-news-today-oh-boy. It was the one-note language of infants that some hidden recess of the brain could translate, a sound to represent everything and nothing.
The Fricatash bar was doing brisk coffee business, as this was a northern California establishment catering to minors. The management, a middle-aged Bengali man named Ravi, expected to be visited by the cops at least twice over the course of the evening and hassled and warned about slackening his vigilance against any on-site drinking by his patrons. Nobody was getting away with anything so don’t get any ideas.
Through the crowd stumbled Ryan in his bomber jacket emblazoned on the back with a child’s iron-on koala bear patch. He squeezed in on the bench between Eve and Skeletor and promptly started laughing, hardy har har at first and then the Crack-Up, body spasming around while he bent forward and muffled his screams in his arm, his long periwinkle-blue hair hanging over the edge of the table like a waterfall.