Tonight there wasn’t much new to report, and Brian shrugged. “Not really. But I’m going to hang out with my mom and Brooke tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll get all caught up on the madness.”
“I mean, is he a hippie? Is it like a love-in thing?”
“No, not my dad. No way. I think it’s more about, uh, the nudity itself. Like the act of being nude. It’s freeing qualities or whatever.”
“Your poor mother,” Robert said, and Brian had to agree. His poor mother. “Hey, Ellis said you applied to the Sandoval thing.” They nearly had to yell at each other to be heard over the hair-metal thundering over the speakers.
“If by ‘applied’ you mean ‘fired off a quickly and haphazardly answered series of questions,’ then yeah, I totally applied.”
Robert nodded, sipped his cocktail. “He’s the Long Way Home guy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But he also did a Bigfoot book, right? That’s why I sent that link to you.”
Brian’s curse: you study historical mythical creatures as an academic, your friends assume you believe the Loch Ness Monster is not only real, but is just misunderstood.
“Yeah,” Brian said. “He’s done a Bigfoot book, one about haunted highways, chupacabras. It’s not really science, you know what I mean?”
Robert said, “Man, I loved The Long Way Home—”
“Because it had Brad Pitt back when he was still bangable,” Ellis barked.
“The thing that Sandoval does that’s so brilliant,” Brian said, “is that he never finds irrevocable proof, you know? He never does. Just enough to maybe color your opinion that what he’s seen might be real. It’s sleight-of-hand stuff. Really, it’s a hell of a brand he’s built.” And with the snooty, off-putting tone of the academic, the pedantic tone that he swore he’d never use and found himself using fairly often, even as his own career stalled, he said, “Mark Sandoval’s more pop culturist than anthropologist, actually.”
Shoot me now, he thought. I have become what I despise. The transformation to ivory tower dickhead is complete.
“That’s true,” Ellis offered, “but anyone who’s been a guest on Coast to Coast? They can pretty much be put in the Most Likely a Nutjob file.”
“But wasn’t he on Oprah, too?” Robert said.
Ellis scoffed. “Yeah, back when you were in tighty-whities. You go on Coast to Coast with guys talking about werewolves and additional dimensions and endless holes—”
Robert lifted his fist. “I’ll show you an endless hole.” Brian burst out laughing, steeling himself against those white stars in his head.
He swirled his beer. “So this is four years of dating, huh? You guys have something really special. It’s admirable. It warms me. Truly.”
“Bite me,” said Robert. “But seriously, you really applied?”
•
They drank more and Brian’s headache began to really settle in. It’d been this way for years, since he was a teenager. He’d missed his senior prom, splayed out on the couch in his living room with a washcloth over his eyes, his friends going to the dance and the ensuing parties without him, his mother high-stepping through the room like a cartoon character, afraid of making a sound. It really did feel like someone was continually scooping out the meat of his head like a curled rind of sherbet. Crazy how pain could become commonplace, like its own appendage. As familiar as a shirt you wore.
At one point, he wasn’t surprised when he looked down—Robert had by then ordered them another outrageously expensive round of drinks, and auto-tuned country music was now chugging out of the bar’s sound system at a bone-rattling level—and saw that his hand was shaking on the tabletop.
That was it. Covering the mouth of his new beer with that same hand, Brian shook his head and mouthed, Sorry.
“What?” Ellis yelled, his hand cupped to his ear.
He motioned at the speakers, his own ear, the beer again. Shrugged. Ellis nodded, gave him a thumbs-up. Robert waved goodbye. The headaches were nothing new to them. The napalm grays had bowed him out plenty of times before.
He pushed through the doors out into a dark, quiet night. The line of cars parked in front of the bar were laced in illumination from a streetlight. To his right was the encampment, painted in shadows. Tarps and tents and mounds of belongings tied tight to shopping carts with bungee cords, with hanks of rope. Huddled shapes in the darkness; dark slabs of men on bedrolls, a woman sitting cross-legged next to a shapeless body beneath a sleeping bag. The city kept shuffling them from place to place, these people. They’d be here for a while, then the police would come through and evacuate the area and they would have to take their things to somewhere new. This, constantly, all over the city. All over the world. It all seemed intrinsically broken, this grand divide. Contain people until they spilled out, and then move them along to somewhere else. Whatever answer he had seemed half-formed, based more on some conflated sense of justice than anything else.
It was a beautiful night, wind-kissed and cool from the Willamette. It seemed impossible then, as he walked home, not to number and catalog the balancing acts he had going in his life, as if something so scenic demanded it. There was the yawning chasm of pointlessness that was his academic career, and the fear all twisted up around that. Fear of failing, fear of succeeding. He had a fractured, confusing dissertation that was good as a blunt force weapon and little else. And there was his father, the nude absconder. His mother’s life seemed powered solely on the jet fuel of her anger, still, these months later, an anger banked in the coals of her heartbreak and sharp sense of betrayal. Romance in Brian’s own life wasn’t even a topic of consideration—he was a sad, pear-shaped man who had grown accustomed by now to his own self-contempt. Just the general, seizing lethargy involved in trying to move throughout the day seemed obstacle enough. I’m just a big ol’ turkey, he thought, basting in the hate-glaze, and just thinking it—this wretched attempt at fey irony—made him shudder with embarrassment. Enough.
He walked. Only a few blocks away from other homeless encampments lay the city’s new jarring landscape: box condos, boutiques, kombucha bars, aesthetically chilling squares of studio apartments topped with rooftop gardens and dog-bathing stations. More envoys of nineteen-dollar cocktails. He’d grown up with these streets and trod a familiar path home even as everything looked so different.
Ellis’s house was a century old: two stories and a basement, a leaning fence holding in a backyard full of blackberry brambles and tufted grass that both of them loathed to take care of. Going up to his room, the pulse of his headache had grown thunderous and red with each footstep, and at one point he had to put his hand against the wall to steady himself. He’d tried allergy meds, acupuncture, sinus remedies, all of it. All of the things he could manage on the threadbare insurance that the college offered. His mother had taken him to an herbalist once, and a woman at a party had claimed to be a phrenologist and mysteriously told him he was cursed with a “maelstrom in the sphenoid” after deliciously massaging his scalp. At times aspirin seemed to work fine. Other times, like tonight, the pain seemed poised to eat him whole.