Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  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.

  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.

  In his room, he sat on his bed and cast another glance at the papers on his dresser. Any buzz from his two
beers was gone. It felt as if someone had driven a luxury car into the back of his head at high velocity and parked it there. He splayed his hand in front of his face and watched the fingers tremble. Willing them to stop did nothing.

  In front of the bathroom mirror, he shook three more aspirin in his hand like dice, chewed them to pulp, stared again into his red-threaded eyes. He had class tomorrow, teaching a Primate Biomechanics class. He dropped another pair of aspirin in his palm, tossed them in. Pictured blood worn so thin that it jetted hose-like from a paper cut, spurting from a dozen minute perforations on his body.

  Back in his room he crawled into bed and cracked open his laptop.

  There were a pair of emails waiting for him. One from his sister with Dinner at Mom’s tomorrow in the subject line. The message just read Bring the wine Mom likes, a textbook example of the brusqueness that Brooke wielded like a club.

  And then his heart rose from the depths of its thinned, overworked blood, did a lazy flip-flop in its cage when he saw the second message. It was from Mark Sandoval. The subject line simply said Interview.

  Mr. Schutt,

  Thanks for your interest in the Research Assistant position. From what I gather, you live in Portland? I’m impressed with your experience, particularly that you’ve studied with Don Whitmer. He and I go way back, actually. Great guy, hell of a teacher.

  Any chance you’re available for an interview? Sooner rather than later? The position needs to be filled immediately. Maybe we could meet up in Don’s office?

  Thanks,

  Mark

  •

  The next day, after what turned out to be an astonishingly little amount of work—a few texts and a single explanatory phone call to Don Whitmer—Brian found himself introduced to Mark Sandoval in his mentor’s office. Brian walked in on legs sea-drunk with nervousness; he’d just plowed through his Primate Biomechanics class and the following discussion group, and it wasn’t until he was standing in the hallway outside Whitmer’s office that his legs truly took on that terrified thrum. Since that final text from Dr. Whitmer—Sure Bri you can meet him here—had come through earlier this morning, his headache had dissipated. It was just a pale ghost now, its fingers occasionally feathering his skull, trilling a little ache here and there, and thank God for that. Meanwhile, his guts roiled. He’d worn a tie. His only sport coat. Tucked his shirt into a pair of slacks that pinched his belly fat like a bully.

  Dr. Whitmer earlier that month had begun Brian’s process of formally dropping out from the doctorate program. What he was doing wasn’t that odd—lots of PhD students dropped out, enough so that there was a common parlance for it. Brian was pulling an ADB—“All But Dissertation.” Whitmer, he knew, was trying hard not to take it personally. It left them in an odd kind of twilight regarding their relationship; Brian’s life at the school was winding down, but he had still TAed for Whitmer as a grad student, still graded his papers and taught his lesson plans. Brian still considered Whitmer his friend. He still looked forward to their discussions, their time together; he would miss the hell out of the warmth and wry, understated kindness of the old man.

  He knocked and Whitmer through the door told him to come in.

  The office was windowless and small with barely enough room for his desk, a dented filing cabinet, and a beautiful oak bookcase that spanned most of one wall and housed his books and a number of relics from his fieldwork. A pair of dark leather chairs faced his desk, their back rails cracked and worn. Anthropology was as fact-based as anything else, Whitmer was fond of saying, and thusly was couched resolutely in the three-armed embrace of theory, investigation, and review. But as a field of study? Anthro would never, ever be financially akin to, say, engineering or drug development. It would never bring in the same type of money for the school. Whitmer’s office was a clear reflection of that. It was the apex of the man’s career, this room, and it would be his death-boat, his Viking funeral: he would die here, in this office. Figuratively if not literally. This was his final destination, as good as it got for Don Whitmer, and why should Brian be so presumptuous to think that he’d fare differently, or even as well? The fact that Whitmer seemed perfectly content with his life served only to scare the living shit out of Brian.

  The two men stood when he entered. Everyone shook hands. Whitmer’s hands were rough, calloused—the worn hands of decades of fieldwork, the hands of a man who still taught dig classes to kids at the Y twice a month. Well versed in chisel and brush and aching knees bent beneath a sun somewhere. Brian had always felt fiercely sentimental toward Don Whitmer, who was old as God, and who held a deep reserve of workmanship inside him that bordered on manic and belied his age and frame. On the Lake Holvamatn dig last year, the old man had transformed into an outright beast, running the excavation site until well past dark, oftentimes needing Brian or another student to remind him to eat and sleep. He’d be retiring within the next few years, and Brian felt as tender towards him as a grandparent. His face was leather-tan, seamed as a map, and today he badly needed to clean his glasses. Sandoval’s hands, meanwhile, were smooth, cool. Writer’s hands. Hands like his own.

  Brian sat down in the vacant chair, the waistline of his slacks once more cutting painfully into his gut. He was sitting next to Mark Sandoval. He was sitting next to a purported alien abductee, a famed cryptozoologist, a New York Times bestselling author. It was a curious type of celebrity the man held, and a weird moment. Sandoval was wearing a gray calfskin jacket over an off-blue dress shirt, brown jeans and boots. Leaning back with his hands laced over his stomach, he managed to effortlessly convey, with his slightly disheveled haircut and going-gray stubble, exactly what he was: a fit, reasonably handsome multimillionaire just over the hillside of fifty. Given Sandoval’s tertiary proximity to the anthropology field—even if only as a punch line, someone to be derided by actual academics and scientists—and his status as a famous person, B-list or otherwise, Brian felt both mildly starstruck and a little annoyed at being starstruck.

  “We were just catching up,” Whitmer said. “Mark was a student of mine back in Seattle.”

  “Long time ago,” Sandoval said. He sounded almost boyish, certainly younger than he looked.

  “Oh, indeed,” Whitmer said with a little chuckle.

  “Wait a minute,” Brian said. His face brightened with sudden understanding. “Don, you’re not . . . Are you Morgan Freeman? In the movie?”

  Whitmer nodded, a curious mixture of humility and—what was that? Contrition? Shame? “Guilty as charged,” he said.

  Sandoval burst into laughter. “How often you get that question, Don?”

  He nodded again. “It does happen sometimes.”

  “Wow,” said Brian. “Really? Wow. How did I not know this? How am I just now finding this out?”

  “Don’s a humble sort,” Sandoval said.

  “It’s not my story to tell.”

  “So you’re the professor in Seattle? Before Mark”—he turned to Sandoval—“before you disappeared?”

  “He was indeed,” Sandoval said. “So when I read your CV and saw Don’s name, I thought it’d be nice to touch base again. Don and I haven’t seen each other in . . .”

  “Years,” Whitmer offered.

  “That’s right.”

  The moment stretched out, both men’s faces unreadable. Brian felt like a bit actor in their drama, something weird unfolding between them. Something he wasn’t privy to, something separate from him. And then Sandoval turned to him, that strange mask that he’d worn against Whitmer packed away. He loosed a gleaming smile that showed significant assistance from some top-notch orthodontists and said, “So! I hear you’re dropping out.”

  Whitmer laughed, not sounding happy at all. “You’ll find, Brian, that Mark gets right to the point.”

  “Why waste time?” Sandoval said. “Everyone’s busy.”

  “Well,” Brian said, suddenly having a hard
time looking at Whitmer. “Just turns out academia isn’t for me.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t have made that discovery before student loans, am I right?”

  A wan smile. “I hear you.”

  “Wasn’t for me either,” Sandoval said. “We’re actually on pretty close parallels in a number of ways, aren’t we, Don?”

  “Well,” Whitmer said, “there’re definitely some similarities. Certainly.” You’d have had to be an idiot not to catch the caution in his voice. Walking a tightrope of propriety. “You’re both brilliant students, devoted to your particular fields—ah, I know what you think about your capabilities, Brian, but please allow me my opinions—and both of you are profoundly gifted in areas that are integral to our studies.” He only mildly sounded like he was choking down something bad.

  Sandoval looked at Brian and shrugged, raised his eyebrows. Hey, that’s pretty good.

  On the corner of Whitmer’s desk sat an age-browned bird skull, the curve of its brainpan wrapped in a chorus of colored twine. Some talisman gifted to him on some long-ago dig. He said, “And I’m glad to see, Mark, that you’ve made such a name for yourself. As unorthodox and difficult a route as it may have been. Truly, I’m happy for you.” He reached over and minutely adjusted the skull. “You’ve made your own way in the world, and you should be proud of that.”

  “Yeah,” Sandoval said, steepling his hands over his stomach again. “It took some work. No lie. And thank you, Don. There were some dark clouds on the horizon there for a while, as I’m sure you remember.”

  “I do.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re the professor,” said Brian.

  And then Sandoval suddenly hunched forward in his chair and gripped the armrests, like he was about to stand up. It was such a quick movement, like someone spying a rat in a corner of the room. “Listen, Don. Would you excuse us, please?”