1
napalm grays
“I became used to gazing between the staggered limbs of trees, at looking beyond the branches and needles, at finding the shapes inside the shapes. That’s where I knew I would find the creature, find the unknown, find whatever mysteries it held: there, between the trees, ensnared in the hidden spaces of the world.”
—Mark Sandoval, Seen Through the Trees
1
It was a help wanted ad from a monster hunter.
The monster hunter, really, if such a term could ever be said out loud without at least a little wince, a self-conscious roll of the eyes. Its arrival came via a forwarded link from Ellis, who in the subject line wrote: Aren’t you into this guy?
It was a spring evening and Brian sat in his room, enveloped in the encroaching night, cradled in his usual pain. A few moths flitted in mortal combat against his window screen, and Brian had the napalm grays going on, had that deep and familiar knife-throb in the skull. The Headache That Lived Forever. Still, Ellis’s line made him smile. Brian heard him downstairs in the kitchen yelling to Robert over the music, cupboard doors slamming closed. They were making drinks—pregame warmups, Ellis called them—before the three of them went out to get stupid, or what passed for stupid these days. Brian was already thinking of ways to bail—his head, when it got like this, in this kind of slow, heated roil, like a halo of barbs being cinched tighter and tighter, alcohol was no good for it.
Down the hall in the bathroom, he dropped a trio of aspirin into his palm and chewed them while he gazed at his face in the mirror. Three would maybe take the edge off, turn the headache from a sharp blade scraping along the bowl of his skull to a dull one. That was about it; you could grow used to anything. He leaned close and gazed at the galaxy of burst blood vessels in one eye.
Back in his room, bass-heavy nü metal ghosting through the floorboards, Robert bellowed laughter in response to something Ellis said. Brian sat back down, looked at the screen of his laptop. His bare feet on the wood floor, the occasional draft from the window fluttering the curtains. The moths outside, insistent and hopeful. Here was spring in Portland: the scent of cut grass, the blat of a car alarm, the creak of a shifting, old, many-roomed house. Ellis’s place he’d inherited from his parents; Brian had been his roommate since they were undergrads.
His desk was choked with stacks of accordion folders, mugs of pens. Outdated anthro journals he kept telling himself he’d read someday. He clicked on the link Ellis had sent, and it took him to a cryptozoology website, and not one of the good ones. Not one of the ones that Brian sometimes cruised (with only the slightest tinge of embarrassment), ones that tended to mirror or replicate the “reputable” sciences. No, this one, menandmonsterz.com, had all the trappings of the technologically inept and socially unhinged: woefully pixilated photos, a dizzying array of fonts stacked and butting up against each other. There was a link, holy shit, to a Myspace page. What If Leprechauns, one headline blared in what was almost certainly Papyrus font, Were Really Pre-Stone Age Hominids!?! This, alongside a fan-art illustration of the Lucky Charms leprechaun leering and holding a stone ax in each hand. Beneath that, a banner ad for hair regeneration. The type of site, honestly, that made antiviral software programmers rich.
And yet, the next part snagged him:
The Long Way Home author, alien abductee, famed cryptozoologist, and renowned cultural anthropologist Mark Sandoval is on the hunt for a research assistant. And maybe it’s YOU!
He snorted at the “cultural anthropologist” part and scrolled down past the iconic cover of The Long Way Home, Sandoval’s memoir about his alien abduction (the image was a tiny human figure enveloped in a cone of light from some unseen but brilliant overhanging light source, the same image they’d used for the movie) and then past Sandoval’s Hollywood-quality headshot. It continued:
Mark Sandoval is looking for a research assistant to accompany him on a site visit outside of the US. Position is confidential and time-sensitive. Terms and compensation commensurate with experience. Visit marksandoval.com to apply.
“Brian!” Ellis bellowed from downstairs. “Get your pregame drink on, dear heart! Let’s do this shit!”
“We’re making the most terrible drinks we can,” warbled Robert.
Brian typed in the address to Sandoval’s website, and it was a much nicer affair. Professional, clean, and surprisingly understated, considering the man claimed to have at one time literally traded punches with a chupacabra. And there was the ad—the same exact information, with a Click to Apply button at the bottom. Vague as hell. Had the air of haste to it, something quickly cobbled together. But he clicked on it, scratched his chin with his thumbnail. Pressed three fingers against his eyelid, felt the sick, familiar throb in the hidden meat behind his eye. He quickly typed in the various fields—name, email address, phone number—and confirmed that he did indeed have a valid passport. Then he uploaded his CV, which he had at the ready because this, of course, was not remotely the first time Brian Schutt had dicked around with the notion of ditching everything in regard to his future. No, this was not the first time at all.
To be fair, it was admittedly a decent resume for a thirty-year-old who was still doggy-paddling through his academic career, who had yet to submit his dissertation—that obnoxious, convoluted, soul-shattering paperweight that it was. As cowardly as he felt when he thought about it, and as one-dimensional and chickenshit as that stasis made him feel, he really was close to being done. And he’d worked on two published papers that he’d been given credit on and had gone on a number of digs with his professor, Dr. Don Whitmer (all of them in the States, true, save for the one on the shore of Iceland’s Lake Holmavatn, hence the passport) and Whitmer was most certainly no slouch in the anthropology world, so hey. There was that. Academic doggy-paddling aside, he really didn’t look too bad on paper. Though what the hell a guy like Mark Sandoval was actually looking for in a research assistant was anyone’s guess. Imperviousness to silver bullets? Telepathy? Acting experience?
Someone clomped up the steps and knocked on his open door. Then Ellis was leaning in the doorway, holding something muddy and dark in a wineglass. Scowling, he took in the state of Brian’s room. The unmade bed, the balled up socks on the floor. Dirty clothes lay in drifts, piled against the molding like windblown garbage. Papers were literally spilling out of the drawers of his desk.
“It smells like you jerked off and then died in here,” he said.
“You’re a charmer.”
“And then jerked off again.”
Brian’s dissertation sat on top of his dresser, a mess of paper stacked three, four inches tall. On top of it rested an old Vietnam-era pineapple grenade long since robbed of its charge. Something he’d bought himself last year as a joke. Supposedly. When the irony of not finishing the thing yet had actually seemed a little ironic, and not weighted and terrible.