Matty’s frown, however, was not aimed at the graffiti; he hadn’t even read it. Rather, he was struggling to syncretize the Talmadge Bertrand with whom he’d spent two years at Ole Miss—freewheeling, ultra-funded, Chi Omega– and Widespread Panic–chasing, Land Cruiser–driving, hard-partying, weed-loving Talmadge Bertrand—with this Version 2.0 Talmadge: the apocalypto downtown squat, the purple star on his temple, the way he’d recoiled from the looted whiskey and had canvassed trash bins on the long walk from the Port Authority like a deer grazing its way down a forest trail. The voice was the same, light and mild as before, and the face more gaunt and fuzzy (like Matty could talk, with that elongated afro below his bottom lip) yet still familiar, but Talmadge seemed hypnotized and . . . and, well, not stoned, because Tal had almost always been stoned, but another kind of stoned, a deeper, aura-altering kind, like one of those chanting, hollow-eyed cult members you sometimes saw on TV, praising King Dwight or the Prophet Bob as ATF agents led them from their raided compound or out of some sick jungle fortress. Though on second thought: That was overkill, man, Tal wasn’t like that. But still, Matty thought, as he noted the absence of lamps and the excess of candles in the room—an entire wax skyline on that side table alone—and realized, with an almost physical jolt, that Talmadge was living, in deepest gaudy Manhattan, without electricity: What the fuck?
The answer appeared from the hallway to his left, looping her naked arms around his neck and planting a noticeably wet though somehow chilly kiss on his cheek: This was Micah, and this, Matty thought, explained everything. Not that she was quote-unquote beautiful; her face, with its overgrown eyebrows and robust nose and jaw, was at certain angles mannish, and there was a faint thickness to her—the cushy way her goosepimpled upper arms settled on his shoulders—that would make Matty, a connoisseur of internet porn, click to another model, were she beckoning to him from his computer screen. Her hair was in dreadlocks, dark and glossy at the roots but woolly and hay-colored at the ends, and she was wearing an aquamarine tank top, with a pink bra beneath it, and an ivory floor-length skirt that swished about her legs. Her left arm and shoulder were overlaid with tattoos—a sleeve of flowers growing out of her wrist—that complemented the downy brown tufts of hair spilling from her armpits, and a silver stud glinted from the side of her nose. If she wasn’t Matty’s type—in his time out west, he’d developed a thing for Asian girls—he could understand the allure anyway: She was like the cakey, crumbly, worm-turned soil that farmers scooped and lifted to their noses in the early spring and sniffed like truffles. Discovering soil like that made people stop and settle, froze wagon trains in their tracks. She was beautiful the way Kansas, which Matty had watched pass outside the bus window as an infinite sheet of gold, was beautiful. She could make you want to put down roots—could make you want to grow.
“Here,” Matty said, digging the fifth of Heaven Hill whiskey from his pack. “A little Thanksgiving present.” A quick wink at Talmadge. “Some of it evaporated on the ride.”
“Thank you,” she said, cradling the bottle. “That’s sweet.”
Talmadge said, “Micah’s straight edge.”
“Oh shit,” said Matty, grabbing the bottle from her and slamming it into Talmadge’s chest. “I know he still parties.”
“Yeah,” she said lightly. Matty missed the subtle signal of tension—a dimple that formed just below her left eye, when her jaw tightened—as he shook one of Talmadge’s shoulders. “I haven’t seen this dog in, like, what, three years? Four?” he said. “I used to live with him so I can relate to the nightmare you’re living.”
“You two went to college together, right?”
“Matty was on a soccer scholarship,” said Talmadge.
“Briefly,” Matty said.
“But—your accent,” Micah said. “You’re not—Mississippi?”
“Jersey, baby. Mahwah. Yankee all the way. Ole Miss offered me the best deal. I was gonna be like General Sherman and burn the whole state down. But I ended up burning too much other shit with this dude.”
“You gonna see your parents?” Talmadge asked him.
“Nah. We sorta cut things off after all that shit went down in Portland. They don’t know I’m here.”
“Portland’s cool,” Micah said.
“Yeah, well, mostly I saw Salem. I did some time at the, erm, prison there.” The jumbled way he revealed that—the cheeky “erm” rubbing against the stoical “I did some time”—suggested that Matty hadn’t yet figured out how to talk about the nine-month prison term he’d just finished. “Possession with Intent, total bullshit. But Portland was—hey,” he said to Talmadge, “the hell you laughing at?”
“Sorry, dude. It’s just weird hearing you say, ‘I did some time.’”
Stiffening, Matty replied, “Yeah, well, it’s weird seeing you digging lunch out of a trash can, asshole.”
“Fucking Santa Claus,” Talmadge said, tugging Matty’s beard.
“Oscar the motherfucking Grouch,” Matty replied, tousling Talmadge’s hair.
“I’m getting back to my cooking,” said Micah. “Y’all be good.”
Other people, she thought, as she sniffed a watery hunk of tofu (two days expired) and set it aside on a warped wooden cutting board latticed with old knifemarks. Yeah. Maybe that’s all it was. In the fifteen months they’d been together, she’d never met any of Talmadge’s friends or family. It was as if he’d sprung from nowhere and/or nobody—this half-formed man-fetus she’d found, nude save for a pair of boyish white Hanes briefs, clawing the dirt at Burning Man, trying to bury a glo-stick in the alkali flats. She’d just broken up, the day prior, with Lola, her girlfriend of three years, and had been wandering the Playa in a dismal funk. She’d been looking for a ride somewhere—anywhere, she didn’t care—but no one was leaving until after the Burn. Thus she was trapped: unable to return, even temporarily, to Lola (their breakup had concluded with the phrase “Have a good life”), yet powerless to escape the Black Rock City limits. Drifting through the camps, amid all that strident glee, she felt like a lost child at the circus. Burning Man was Lola’s thing: For four years she’d run an info tent preaching the gospel of Freeganism, a mishmash philosophy (its name derived from the compound of “free” and “vegan”) to which Lola had converted Micah in the early bloom of their relationship. Lola loved all of it: the rowdy tent-revivalist vibe, the earnest salesmanship, dispensing brochures and instructional tips (“with reclaimed produce, look for a nine at the beginning of the price look-up code—nine means organic, four means Monsanto”), plus the whole mindfreak carnival tableau: the psychobilly and surfbilly blasting from the camps beside them, the art cars and drum bands, the psychonauts and pole dancers and ravers and pervs and Deadheads and Goa trancers and the topless old earthmothers with their flapjack breasts and the slackjawed pyros at the Burn, their dilated orange eyes chasing the spark-swirls heavenward. Micah, on the other hand, hated it. True, the first time had been cool, like the ideal lover simultaneously exotic and comforting; by the third time, however, she’d come to despise it, likening it to the Las Vegas strip sans money. Everyone was after something, she’d decided, nevermind all the communal/tribal atmospherics. Everyone had an angle, an itch they’d come to have scratched. She felt like MOOP, the Burning Man acronym for “matter out of place,” meaning the litter strewn across the desert after the camps were dismantled: foreign items found where they don’t belong. There on the Playa, back in San Francisco with Lola, neck-deep in the whole catfighty activism scene (LGBT rights, antiwar, antiglobalization, ecofeminism, freecycling—Lola was freelance, she did them all), everything, life, all of it: She was matter out of place, she was Micah out of place. She was MOOP.
So too was Talmadge, swimming on the ground, caked in white gypsum dust—alone and, from what Micah could gather, as she scanned the makeshift camps around him, abandoned. Some frat-boy types, suckling twenty-four-ounce cans of beer, were watching him from outside their RV, laughing. “Don’t touch the fish!” one shou
ted to her. “Fish gotta swim!” another called. She knelt down beside him. Rivulets of powdered drool ran down his chin and a long rope of mucus swung from his nose. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to bury the green glo-stick or was paddling after it, like a bass tailing a minnow, through the kaleidoscopic eddies of his mind, but it didn’t matter either way: He was obviously tripping, and tripping badly. “Can someone help me?” she called to the frat boys. One called back: “She caught the fish!” Others: “Reel him in!” “He’s getting away!” “Don’t eat the fish!” Finally one of them walked over and said, deadpan, “Is this your fish?” “Just help me get him up,” she said, and together, with awkward grunting difficulty, they lifted Talmadge to his feet, in the process scraping his underwear down around his thighs. “I see fish dick!” one of the frat boys exclaimed.
The crowds parted and hushed, crucifixion-style, as they hauled Talmadge limply through the dust. Hopelessly slack, his legs trailed behind him, his toes leaving curvy snake trails in the dust. Every now and again he would splutter something unintelligible but anxious-sounding, then revert to a blank drooly stare. “Where are we headed?” asked the frat boy, who’d introduced himself as Cooper, and for a long while Micah didn’t answer. She didn’t know. Or rather, she knew but didn’t want to admit it: They were taking him to Lola’s tricked-out camper van. “Over this way,” she told him. “Who is he?”
“The fish? I don’t know. Said he was a Beta from Mississippi.”
“What’s a Beta?”
“Beta Theta Pi. It’s a fraternity. He just kind of stopped by and sat down. Said he’d done a massive bump of Special K and needed to chill. Then he started getting all freaky and took his clothes off. When it got too weird we just rolled him the fuck away. Dude is out there. He’s in the K-Hole, man.”
Lola sighed, not unhappily, when Micah appeared begging for help. Micah never needed help—that had long been one of Lola’s issues. “You wouldn’t grab my hand if you were drowning,” Lola had once told her, but now here she was: not drowning herself, but lugging another drowning victim toward her—close enough. She helped Micah and Cooper unload Talmadge onto one of the two narrow mattresses in the camper van and, because she worked part time as an EMT, checked Talmadge’s pulse and pupils. “Ketamine, you said?” she asked Cooper, who waved his hands in front of his chest, to absolve himself of responsibility, before easing himself backwards into the passing herds, shouting “Bye, fish!” once he was safely absorbed in the crowd. To Micah, she said, “They call it the K-Hole. A high-enough dose sends you there. They say it’s like a pit you fall into, separated from your body. Big-time hallucinations, total lack of exterior awareness. That explains the ataxia. We treated a girl at some club in the Castro who was like this. Supportive care, mostly. They tend to pass out after an hour or two.” Without asking too many questions, though her expression suggested distrustful bewilderment, she told Micah to close the curtains, to stay close beside him, to avoid questioning him so as not to induce anxiety, to keep the “environment” gentle and dim. “Like a womb,” she said. “What he needs right now is the security of a womb.”
Outside the van, in the dust-glittered sunlight, Lola paused before shutting the rear doors. “I was hoping you’d come back,” she said. When Micah didn’t respond, she shook her head sadly, staring, then shut the doors, enclosing Micah and Talmadge in that familiar dingy must, with Lola’s Freegan ’zines stacked against the sides, her and Micah’s clothes crammed in cardboard liquor boxes, the light seeping through the red-bandana curtains suffusing the van’s interior with the plummy dimness of a photographer’s darkroom.
“There now,” Micah whispered, as he murmured to the ceiling. She stroked his crusty hair with her left hand while her other hand, palm pressed flat against his bony hairless chest, monitored the slow cadences of his heart. Though his eyes were open, he didn’t seem to register her presence; blinking, and softly jerking, they weren’t quite corpse eyes, but seemed just as distant, tuned to some outer-galactic channel she couldn’t see or hear. “There now,” she whispered again, this time with her lips at his ear, close enough to feel the heat of her breath reflected back upon her, and to inhale the smell of his skin: ripe and slightly sweet, like the inside of a squash. Her hand slipped off the cliff of his ribcage to the corrugated plains of his belly and lingered there—maternally, the way a mother strokes her sleeping child, but sensually as well—faintly, chastely, and if not quite subconsciously then something close—in the way her hand orbited his navel and then glided over to his arm, her fingertips gently mashing the long stringy muscles they discovered corded there. For a long time, she watched him, as if enthralled by some sculpture from antiquity: his stony litheness, the chisel-marked grace of his long arms and torso, the floury sheen of dust that imbued his skin with a matte luster of fired clay.
Noting the dust swirls left by her hands, she fetched the bucket of water she and Lola had been using to sponge-bathe themselves. Talmadge’s eyelids flickered as she squeezed the sponge over his chest, the cool water dribbling down his ribs and pooling at his navel. As clinically as she could, she slipped off his underwear and dropped it to the floor. Humming lightly, she guided the sponge up and down his body, the fresh nude skin it revealed appearing like smears of color on white canvas, as if she wasn’t so much washing a man as creating one, daubing him to life with the tawny, chewed-looking sponge. The burbling sound it made, when she wrung out the sponge over the bucket, was like a mountain stream she remembered from childhood, where the stream—an unnamed trickle, on the blue-green edge of the Smoky Mountains—went spilling over some moss-glazed stones two feet down into a limpid pool in which Micah would cool her feet, the cold blissfully stinging her curled toes. The evocation was pleasurable and for a long while she reveled in it. Meanwhile the sponge traveled everywhere: ruddying his cheeks, glistening his hair, smoothing the oily curls in his armpits, polishing the grille of his attenuated, countable ribs. She paused, at his penis, but sensing no reaction when she ran the sponge between his thighs to their humid intersection beneath the chicken-skinned orbs of his testicles, she continued.
She hadn’t been with a man in four, five years, she realized; enough years, in fact, that most of the men had been more properly called boys. (Lola never understood the way Micah’s affections could toggle back and forth between genders; she’d claimed Micah was self-delusional, owing to the backwoods way she was raised, or else just plain greedy. That was another of her issues.) Those encounters, however, had almost always been swift and mechanical, their narratives circumscribed by custom if not biology; unlike with women, there was rarely time to linger, to explore, to pass an hour doodling random fingertip patterns on another’s skin, or mapping the riverine trails of postcoital sweat. Always there was that lurching, insistent erection. With selfish male lovers, it ended there, at the guttural, sleep-inducing finish. With the selfless ones, however, the lingering and exploring was always directed at her, on her; they couldn’t bear reciprocation. She’d never noticed, for instance, the embossed line of flesh that ran down the underside of the penis and divided the testes, so straight it seemed surgically crafted. Or the accordion pleats of the slumbering penis, or the nimbus of frizzy hair on the testicles that, neither silky nor coarse, reminded her of the soft, pliable, ultrafine thorns on the canes of a certain wild berry she used to graze upon during her childhood summers. Cupping his fever-warm testicles in her right hand, she drizzled his groin with water from the sponge in her other hand, then swabbed his lolling penis, shifting it tenderly from side to side as one adjusts a sleeping infant. When she felt a delicate pulsing, at its base, accompanied by a quick, brittle-sounding inhalation from up above, she stopped, wagging her head as if to revive herself from a dream. Stroking his hair again, she whispered, “It’s okay, lie still.”
After shedding all but her panties, she nestled herself beside him on the narrow mattress, pulling a maroon flannel sheet over them both. Passing in and out of sleep, she shushed him, whenever
he’d start to murmur again, pressing a finger to his lips. Micah had no idea who he was, or what he would say or do when the technicolor fog cleared from his brain, when he climbed back out of the hole they claimed he was in, but she trusted the narcotic peace she was feeling with her body coiling his—the contact high from his flesh pressing against hers. Something more than a samaritan impulse had drawn her to him, she felt certain—like her father, who she guessed was at that very moment reading scripture aloud to himself in the grainy darkness of his cabin, Micah believed in invisibilities. She didn’t share her father’s faith but had faith just the same.
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