Ellis offered him the wineglass and Brian said, “I don’t know, man. My head’s killing me.”
Ellis frowned. “Drink it.”
As if he were psychic or the room was bugged, Robert yelled, “Drink it!” from downstairs, drawing out the last word until it ended in a series of yips and howls.
Brian took a sip, smacked his lips. Took another drink. Squinted up at Ellis. And then it hit him. “Jesus. What’s in this?”
Ellis ticked them off with his fingers. “Coke, whiskey, vodka. Instant coffee, cocoa.”
“Ah, God. Barf.”
“Oh! Nutritional yeast. Some cherry liqueur Robert got from a work party two Christmases ago. Onion powder.”
“Ellis, no.”
“We’re pregaming, remember? Robert calls it an Arkansas Dust Cloud, but if I told you why, you’d probably throw up for real.” His face brightened when he saw what was on Brian’s laptop. “Hey, you went to the thing! The website.”
Brian was a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I’m applying.”
“You are? I was just kidding! I just thought you liked that movie. You’re actually applying?” Ellis got louder the more he drank, more bombastic, and Brian assumed by the way he slapped his hand against his chest in shock that this probably wasn’t his first Dust Cloud.
“Yeah. I mean, why not?”
“Because you live here,” Ellis said, sitting down on Brian’s bed and taking the wineglass from him. He drank a third of it and didn’t flinch. A rind of dark flakes clung to the inside of the glass. “You live here, young man, and you’re the only person I could ever cohabitate with and not ultimately throat punch to death.”
“Besides Robert,” Brian offered.
“Psssh,” Ellis said, waving a hand. “Neither of us are in any rush there, believe me.”
“Well, it says it’s a site visit, so it’s not like I’d be gone long anyway.”
Ellis nodded, swirled the contents of the wineglass. “Seriously though, this room. Fetid does not begin to describe it.”
“Listen, you mind if I finish this?” Brian said, pointing at his computer.
“Drink the fucking thing,” Robert yelled from downstairs.
“He thinks he’s too good for it,” Ellis yelled back.
Sometimes, when Brian laughed and his headache was particularly bad, he saw white stars populate the corners of his vision. It happened now, and he winced a little and said, “Just let me finish this and we can head out.”
Ellis had a moment of concern—they’d lived together long enough. He knew what one of Brian’s bad nights looked like. “I’m just kidding you—if you need to stay in, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I’ll just finish this. I’m good.”
“That is so funny,” Ellis said, standing up and smoothing his shirt. “Robert sent that to me as a joke. You’re really applying?” He walked out, made as if to slam Brian’s bedroom door and then, grinning, gently closed it instead.
There really wasn’t much else to do. Under the Availability field he typed in “Immediately.” The last field threw him for a minute. He sat there, tapping out a little rhythm on the lip of his desk. Bass throbbed downstairs, a new song, dance music that made wavering ripples among the various mugs of coffee sitting on his desk.
Why does cryptozoology interest you?
Blessed with the casual honesty afforded those who didn’t really give much of a shit one way or the other, he typed, “Because I want to believe in the unknown. In the idea of something beyond, something atypical. Even if I know there’s nothing out there in the dark, nothing under the bed, I still wish the possibility was there.”
•
They cabbed to a bar underneath the Morrison Bridge. As Ellis and Robert chatted with the driver, Brian thumbed through his phone. It was the usual confluence of the brutal and the mundane: A pop star wore a midriff-revealing top to showcase her new baby bump. A girl in a Seattle middle school accidentally shot herself in the thigh with the handgun she’d smuggled to class in her backpack. White nationalists convened on a small town in Alabama for a “Whites Only Commerce Day,” urging business owners to turn away people of color. Bedlam and violence ensued, leaving one dead. A bubonic plague outbreak in China, five confirmed cases. In a small town in Idaho, a dog saved a child’s cat from a tree. There was a video clip of the dog scaling the tree and picking the mewling cat up by the scruff of its neck. Brian watched, numbed.
Get me, he thought, the hell out of here.
•
The place was called Drill. It was dark and hangar-like, its long walls festooned with repurposed slats of rusted steel spattered with useless rivets. A glossy cement floor. Dim and crowded, it stood next door to a French-fusion restaurant called the White Bird, and on the opposite side was a rundown, cobwebbed CPA office, some last remnant of old Portland hanging on like some vestigial tail. Their bartender had a handlebar mustache and a tattoo of a sparrow on his throat. Ellis’s drink came with a charred pinecone snared into the lip of the glass, and the price of their three drinks combined equaled more than what Brian spent on groceries in a week.
A homeless encampment was clustered around the bridge column outside their window, a small satellite city of shopping carts and tarps and battered tents ringed around it. He saw the occasional flutter of flashlights or cell phone screens casting wan illuminations on the pavement. Here, he thought, was capitalism distilled: the old Portland had been vanquished, decimated, and in this bar was the new city rising from the ashes, a recalcitrant phoenix that flexed its wings and built code and drove hybrids and staunchly ignored the poor. A wealthy, tech-savvy phoenix that shat neck tattoos and charred artisanal pinecones. He felt momentarily buoyed by self-righteousness, and then he remembered where he was and what he was doing—slowly flagellating his way around a PhD and drinking a twelve-dollar IPA that someone else had bought for him—and felt indescribably old instead.
The bridge’s column seemed to have become some kind of memorial. A few wilted bouquets, some illegible chalking of a name across the rippled cement. A scattering of tea candles. Headache or not—and tonight’s headache, it turned out, had laughed at the aspirin, had given the aspirin a wedgie and shoved it in some random locker—he felt a true lurch in his heart, some tug of sorrow.
“How’s the dad these days?” Ellis asked, waggling his eyebrows, pulling Brian from what passed for his reveries. “Any news?” Ellis and Robert took an unabashed pleasure in the travails of Brian’s folks. Telling them the newest, insane events as they unfolded were pretty much the only good thing about the shitshow that was his family.