USFS 2019 — Part 3, Chapter 3

“MacKenzie, I need your help in this game.”

The voice came from the table, where I could hear people had gathered to play cards. And though the permanent law enforcement guy, Adam, was not there as far as I knew, his golden retrievers named Friday and Elaine were. I had been upstairs since getting back from Pete’s late that afternoon. I didn’t know how many life forms had made it into the house since then, but the dogs materialized quietly when I made it to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. Their tails swished with measured anticipation as I walked by the fridge.

“Do you really need my help or do you just want it?” I began saying it before I could see the table to discover it was Ben who had called. “Oh, it’s you! Hey.” I could hear the irritability drop out of my own voice and immediately braced myself for the shit I fully expected Ian and Bridger to give me because of it.

“Notice how much less annoyed she sounds when she realizes it’s Ben and not one of us asking for something,” Ian said.

“Settle down. I see you and Bridger almost every day. I see Ben, like, once a week.” I briefly questioned the average because the last time I’d seen him, the night of July 3, hadn’t felt that long ago. But the reality was that it had been more than a week since then. The coming week would mark the first in four I wouldn’t have to spend any time in the backcountry. The previous three had felt extremely compressed and I think the surplus of time off the grid had a lot to do with that.

I was wary about sitting down before I knew what I was committing to. “Seriously, Ben, do you actually need me, or are you just asking for my endorsement?”

“I want you on that wall,” Ben said, pounding his fist on the table for dramatic effect.

“‘You need me on that wall!’” I said it leaning over the table and raising my voice to what for me was an uncomfortable volume unless I was actively reciting dialogue like that.

“Callahan, where is this certitude coming from?” Ian asked

“My Moon in Scorpio,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, sitting down across from Ben now. I got the impression from how the square table was organized—Bridger and Ian diagonal from one another and Ben between them with an open spot across from him—that they were about to start a game of euchre. Once my presumed partner and opponents confirmed that, I said I’d play on the condition they answer questions as we went. I went such long gaps without playing cards that most of the rules never stuck. Nonetheless, because of my prudence, pattern recognition, and what I think was just an unusual amount of dumb luck, I tended to fare extremely well in games that required a mix of strategy, patience, and chance. By game’s end, nobody ever believed that I hadn’t known the rules the entire time, and somebody always voiced a suspicion that it was all just my masterful ploy. I was flattered to be thought smart and dedicated enough to engineer a whole front to win card games, but the fact is that I lacked the guile to do any such thing. I wouldn’t have lasted more than a hand before having to out myself if I ever tried.

This was my first time playing euchre with any of my coworkers on the Peninsula, and the scene played out much as it had elsewhere in my life: me asking questions about the mechanics of the game every few hands, my partner and I somehow cruising to a nine-point score, our opponents outraged as it unfolded.

“We’re in the barn, MacKenzie,” Ben said, not fully standing up, but deliberately rising to extend his reach across the table. “Milk the cow.”

I was confused by his seriousness and wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. “Sorry. What?” His fingers were laced in what I assumed was some ceremonial gesture, his palms facing me and his thumbs pointing straight down.

“His thumbs are udders,” Bridger said.

“Oh god…so anatomical.”

“I don’t make the rules, MC. Just milk the damn cow,” Ben said.

“What if I conscientiously object?”

“Are you going to make a big deal about this?” Ian said. “It’s game point of a fucking card game that you’re about to win.” I recognized this tone as that belonging to bad-loser Ian. It was in the same family as the tone I’d heard back in June when he’d come on to me. Though the udder situation did make me genuinely uncomfortable, I was somewhat amused that losing a game of euchre could induce the same sense of injured ego for the guy that an unrequited proposition could.

“Okay, Jesus. It’s not a big deal, I just think the anatomical invocation of a female dairy cow’s udders is a little weird. I also think touching hands in general is weird. Here,” I said, alternately pulling Ben’s thumbs. “Do we all feel like our time in the barn has been sufficiently observed? Can we carry on?”

Ian threw his cards. I can’t remember if I covered my face at that moment, but I tend to when I imagine scenarios like the one that transpired. Rage makes me so very uncomfortable. I didn’t even need to be nearby; it stressed me out when it was merely represented or suggested. I was kind of relieved that the tidiness implications were not my immediate concern when Ian had his meltdown right next to me. Not that what took the place as my primary concern offered much in the way of comfort and assurance. Male volatility was a strange and unpredictable thing. It’s also something I had little experience with, having lived out my formative years with two males who’d been chronically subdued, sullen, and emotionally exhausted. I noticed that Bridger and Ben looked unperturbed about the whole outburst, and it turned out that they had even been hiding their amusement until Ian had made it outside. They laughed once we’d heard the door open and close. I wanted to be relieved, but there was a part of me that objected to the whole idea of dismissing it as innocuous—something I felt people often deployed laughter inappropriately to do.

“This is literally why he gets kicked out of casinos. Ian is an awful, awful loser,” Ben said.

“I mean, I kind of envy the guy. I have a hard time getting an emotional kick from anything and you’re saying this is normal for him?” I looked at Ben when I asked.

“Bridger, you haven’t known Ian as long as I have. You can vouch that this is pretty typical from what you’ve seen, yes?”

“Utterly typical, I daresay,” Bridger said, making a concerted effort to wink as he said the word utterly to make sure we caught the pun.

“Well played, dad,” I said. “So, the thing about this kind of behavior though—if I acted this way, I would be out of a job. I understand that this is an unanswerable question because we’re talking about centuries’ worth of patriarchal rigging here, but why can dudes get away with not being adults when it comes to down-regulating their anger? Like, when this is a man, we’re like, ‘oh, don’t mind him. He has a short fuse. He’ll get over it.’ Or we just think it’s funny. But when it’s a woman, we’re still like, ‘She’s hysterical. Lock her up.’”

“I think Ian’s just got a really delicate ego,” Bridger said.

“I mean, so do I, but I’ve sought professional help for that. I don’t know. I want to give Ian the benefit of the doubt that there’s more to the story. But I just think that some people could afford to try a little harder.”

“MC, you’re probably right. But—and don’t come at me for saying this because I know it will make you uncomfortable—you’re also next-level as far as humans go, and most people will never be as self-aware as you are.” As Ben said it, he stood to begin collecting the scattered cards.

“You sound like my old therapist. Look, if self-awareness is the measuring stick here, people hype it like it comes naturally to some people. First of all, that’s just not true. But I think the other problem with that is that people can excuse themselves from doing the work to get perspective. And that’s not fair.” As I said that last bit, Friday and Elaine rose from where they’d splayed out next to the table, suddenly rapt with enthusiasm. A few seconds later, Ian walked back in with Adam. I’d only seen Adam once before and I didn’t think we’d even been introduced.

“Look at that, dogs, your sponsor came to your AA meeting today,” Ben joked.

“Hey folks. Thanks for watching my dogs,” Adam said.

“They can stay if they want, but they’re on their own if they’re hungry. I think we’re down to mostly alcohol here,” Ian said.

“Adam, have you met Bridger and MacKenzie?” Ben asked.

“I don’t think I have, but I heard the damn goat came back on MacKenzie’s watch, so she must be alright.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Ben said, dropping one of the last cards he’d salvaged—one that had made it all the way to the kitchen in Ian’s fury.

“You buried the lede, MC,” Bridger said.

“Can we wait and confirm Glorified G is still there when Ian’s out tomorrow before we decide to call it a lede?”

“Even if it’s gone again,” Adam said, “I really enjoyed a full week without property and budget people in Port Angeles on my ass about the goat.”

“But you’re law enforcement. Why are they bothering you about that?” Ben asked.

“They always come after the guy who’s here year-round,” Adam said.

“I mean, it’s probably annoying for them to have to keep tabs on this thing that’s liable to run off at will. Can you explain to us why the goat’s even out there?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” Adam said.

“Hmm,” Bridger said, nodding his head and lifting his hand as though signaling that he’d received an important update from headquarters. “Let’s ask Picture Picture.”

“Picture Picture,” Ben said, turning to a painting of a wooden boat gliding through what appeared to be an enchanted cove. It was the Rain Shadow’s single feature that was purely ornamental. “Why does the Forest Service still have a backcountry goat?”

“What the hell?” Adam asked quietly as Bridger, Ben, and I locked our attention on the portrait for an extended moment.

“Looks like Picture Picture is still broken,” I said.

“I don’t know why. There’s been a work order in for it as long as I’ve had this job,” Ben said.

“I’m sorry. What’s going on with the picture?” Adam probed again.

“They ask the painting unanswerable questions. It’s like a Mister Rogers thing,” Ian explained in what could’ve played back as a nice, funhouse inversion of an “OK, boomer” meme, but addressed to a Gen Xer. Shouldn’t the roles have been reversed here? Why were we explaining a Mister Rogers reference to a man in his fifties?

“Oh, sure,” Adam said, sounding unmoved, if a little spooked by the unchecked weirdness. I would eventually remember Adam missing the reference and it occurred to me later in the summer to ask who his dogs had been named after, if not Lady Elaine and King Friday from the Neighborhood of Make Believe. It turned out the retrievers had been his wife’s dogs and he often forgot their namesakes. That conversation toward the end of my season was the only clue as to the source of the mysterious and uncontested Mister Rogers influence that suffused the Neighborhood of Hood Canal. Keeping with the budding theme in my life of immaterial forces exerting outsized influence in the material realm, Adam’s spouse had been dead for five years as of September 2019.

“Going back to the question about the goat,” Adam said, “I’ll tell you what somebody told me when I first started working for the federal government. Always remember that the Forest Service, Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management operate on tradition even when that tradition makes no fucking sense. That’s my best explanation for why we’re probably the only crew in America that has to worry about a backcountry goat. Some dipshit superintendent probably thought it was a genius solution to keep the overgrowth down near the cabin. It’s all above my pay grade.”

I reasoned to myself that that probably hadn’t been the worst idea. There wasn’t much for predators out there. And even if a cougar made its way to the second-growth area, the conventional wisdom was that they wouldn’t attack anything larger than them. “Do we know what an angora goat’s life expectancy is? Like, how long, at maximum could this goat hold out before dying of natural causes?”

“Have we already ruled out that this could be an immortal goat?” Bridger asked. He had a point. We had, after all, ordained Glorified G the at-large wizard of the Neighborhood of Hood Canal not two weeks prior.

“This is true. Should we ask Picture Picture to be safe?” Ben said.

“It’s no use,” I said.

When they asked me to recall the circumstances of Glorified G’s return, I told them the goat was just there when I woke up Tuesday morning and that it was no more exciting than that. I redacted several details, including the handclaps, the goat’s sheared appearance, and my theory that he had stiff-armed his way into the groundskeeping gig as a cover to live out his days foraging for psilocybin. I thought about the Squatchers, who I hadn’t run into at all. As I’d mentioned to Pete, the possibility that they’d been the ones messing with me had crossed my mind. I seriously contemplated bringing that up at the Rain Shadow, thinking it might prompt a confession if the perpetrator of everything was among us. At the time, I also hadn’t ruled out that what I’d experienced had been part of a routine hazing ritual for new seasonals.

“Well, you kind of caught a break with that Squatcher party leaving early,” Adam said.

“Wait, they left early? How early?” That bit explained why I hadn’t seen them at all, thereby narrowing the list of suspects behind the handclapping antics.

“They packed out Monday night.”

“I missed that memo. I probably made it to the parking area Tuesday morning not long after they left.”

“Well, that won’t be the last time you’ll see that bunch this summer,” Adam said. “I think they already have a permit for another long itinerary, but for a smaller party.”

“Fabulous,” I deadpanned. “I hope it’s not during one of my rotations.”

“No? Not even if they find something cool?” Bridger asked.

“No. Especially not if they find something cool.”

“Why not?”

“Society writes you off as a crackpot whenever you see something cool,” I said.

“Hey, that’s true,” Ben said, emerging from the kitchen with a six-pack that he placed on the table. “You have a novel experience, and the first thing people ask is if you were high or drunk.”

“And if you’re Bridger off the clock, the answer is always yes,” Ian said.

“That’s not fair. There have been days where I am the only sober person in this house,” Bridger protested.

“I think it’s just easy to cast you as the drunk because you’re the youngest and have more stamina than any of us,” I said.

“You guys aren’t that much older than me.”

“A few years is a big difference in alcohol time, bud,” Ben said. “The tank starts shrinking dramatically after 22. I’m convinced the real reason they set the legal drinking age at 21 is because production would struggle to keep up with demand if underage folks could legally buy their own alcohol.”

“He really doesn’t believe us,” Ian said, opening a can and offering it to Adam. He did it again and offered the next one to me.

“I don’t accept drinks from men who disapprove of me,” I said.

“Is that you as MacKenzie Golightly?” Ben asked.

“Bingo,” I said. “But in seriousness, I’m still working on this one,” I said pointing at a beer already in front of me.

“Suit yourself,” Ian said, helping himself to the can he just opened.

“So, you really don’t want to know if the Squatchers find anything?” Bridger asked me.

“I really don’t. For the reason I just explained. And because my Neptune is in Capricorn.”

“What does that mean?” Bridger asked.

“It means I tend to repress my own intuition. So one of my superpowers is tricking myself into not seeing something I know is there. I would hate for a novel experience to be wasted on that.”

“Do you believe that stuff?” Ian asked.

“Sasquatch?” Adam asked.

“No, astrology. We’re all on the same page about Sasquatch here,” Ian said.

“Astrology? Ian, we’ve gone over this. We’re all dead star matter,” I said. “Do you remember being consulted about whether you wanted to come down here and be alive as a human being? I don’t. If I had been asked, I would’ve been a hard pass. I didn’t choose to be alive as a human in 2019, so I’ll take whatever a birth chart can give me to figure out how to live my life. It’s all just based on where other matter in the universe was relative to where you were when you materialized as what we know as Ian. If you look at it as energy and matter—so, physics—it’s not that weird.”

“I want to respect that, but if this stuff is all so deterministic, why do I have to be an evil Scorpio?” Ian asked.

“It’s not deterministic. It’s just one way of contextualizing things,” I said.

“And Scorpios aren’t evil. They’re just loyal,” Ben said.

“That’s not what you two told me,” Ian said, looking at me and Bridger now.

“Ian, they’re Sadges. Don’t take them literally. They have complicated feelings that don’t lend to articulation. Besides, if they used that word, they probably didn’t mean it pejoratively. It’s possible that they see you as more of a complex figure that they identify with.” Ben was really leaning into this as a way of messing with Ian, who started walking away from the table again, this time apparently for his room. He didn’t even take the beer he’d just opened.

“Yeah, maybe we think of you like Milton’s Satan—fallible, but in a way we relate to,” I said.

“I can’t handle this.” We could hear Ian take the first few stairs as he yelled it.

“Ben, you seem to know a lot about this stuff. What’s your Sun sign?” I asked.

“Pisces.”

“She eyes me like a Pisces when I’m weak,” Bridger said, pointing at me with his thumb.

“It gets better. I’m Cancer Rising,” Ben said.

“Mmm,” I said, shaking my head as I swallowed some water and reached for the can Ian left behind to see how full it was. “I wish I could eat your Cancer when you turn black. Ben, where is In Utero in your pantheon of Nirvana records?”

“Excluding the MTV Unplugged recordings, top-shelf is between that and Bleach.”

I withheld my own opinion only because both Ben and Bridger knew where I stood on the matter: In Utero was the most chilling in hindsight, and thereby the most compelling. “Did Adam legit make an Irish exit with the dogs and the beer we gave him once the astrology part of the conversation took off?”

“I think it actually was right after the Sasquatch part,” Ben said. He had the visual of the front door, as Bridger and I were sitting with our backs to it. “I think the guy has just been at this job forever and is over the Sasquatch talking points. Plus, he is worked. I got in late yesterday and I think I heard him on the radio at 1am before I went to bed. Then, when I went to the office to drop something off around 4pm this afternoon, he was there on the phone again. Anyway, sorry, we didn’t get to properly enjoy that win, MC. If I rope you in again, I’ll make sure it’s not against Ian.”

I wasn’t super sour about how it all went down from a competitive standpoint, but as a completist, it did stress me out to just not be able to see the game to its natural end. But I was also determined to make a dad joke over the new information regarding Ben’s Sun sign before the conversation could meander. “Ben, I find it fishy that you’re both a Pisces and the only person originally from Washington on this crew.”

“You know I can’t do your dad jokes,” Ben said. Ben’s intolerance for puns was, as far as I knew, the one significant matter on which we did not see eye to eye. It is precisely why Bridger, Ian, and I made a special effort to make particularly indulgent ones around him.

“But you don’t deny that there’s little difference between you and a fish,” Bridger said.

“I’ll own that. Literally, my favorite memory in my Seattle upbringing was raising a salmon for school.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Yeah. Salmon in the Schools. Look it up.”

Skeptical that he was messing with us, Bridger pressed Ben for details while I enlisted the help of Google to confirm that Ben’s experience wasn’t an isolated incident. Sure enough, there was a collaboration between city government, schools, and watershed groups where Seattle school children raised salmon from egg to fry before releasing them into local creeks and Lake Washington each spring. I got unexpectedly weepy reading about the whole thing, which brought on profuse teasing from Ben and Bridger who, up to that point, thought I lacked any detectable emotional range. They were mostly correct in that view, but I did have a soft spot for people caring for, of all things, fish. The same went for birds and that’s why I’d always felt a visceral connection to the salmonfly. How many other organisms that lived most of their lives underwater also got to fly before they parked it?

I didn’t get too deep into it with Bridger and Ben, but I had started to see a striking universality in the ephemeral quality of the flight-enabled phase of the salmonfly life cycle. There seemed to be a version of it in every wrinkle of life if you paid attention. Things often disappeared before you realized you were seeing something special. Then you wondered if you’d hallucinated.

“You know, I could be a real jerk right now and reprise the joke about how hard you Sadges love to commune with the earth and shit.” It was Ian, presumably recovered from whatever catatonic tailspin the presumptive euchre loss sent him into. I was relieved when Ben remarked that he’d been damn quiet coming down the stairs. I hadn’t heard him either and was at first paranoid that I had gone into some kind of a witchy trance once I’d started waxing about the poetics of the salmonfly hatch, somewhat out loud, but mostly in my head.

“Hey, man, if you’re looking for a rematch, that’s not happening tonight. I’m splitting soon,” Ben said.

“I don’t think it’s technically a rematch if you didn’t actually finish one game first,” I said.

“Relax. I’m good now,” Ian said. “I just did one of those psychological distancing things Callahan taught me.”

“I’m sorry. What did she teach you?” Bridger asked.

Ian explained how I made us pretend to have a conversation using the government radios once after he came on to me in June. He didn’t know if what he did was in the same family, but he admitted that, as an anger management tool, he’d started privately talking through the plush orca he’d won at a trivia night in Port Townsend. I was blown away—not only that he’d made a habit of it, but that he was talking openly about it.

“That’s big Mister Rogers energy right there, MC,” Ben said.

“If you were less morose, you and Fred Rogers would be indistinguishable,” Bridger said.

“Pete’s partner Ayla was actually the person who got me and my brother to do that. We used to have bad fights, and one got especially bad.”

“And by ‘bad,’ she means she almost killed her brother.”

“That’s an exaggeration, but, yes, Elliott was in rough shape and it scared my dad. Ayla’s strategy worked though. Elliott and I have never fought since.” After our whole back-and-forth about Ben’s endemic fishiness, the re-invocation of Mister Rogers made me think about the episode of his show with a goldfish. I seldom thought about it overtly, but that particular episode had stayed with me because it was about death. I didn’t cite that bit of trivia out loud, but my coworkers did ask why my Mister Rogers knowledge was so thoroughgoing. I explained that my dad was from Pittsburgh and had made a meticulous point to initiate Elliott and me in a somewhat comprehensive knowledge of the city’s cultural touchstones. They asked who belonged on the pantheon of Pittsburgh icons besides Fred Rogers. I dismissed the question because narrowing the field to pantheon capacity would inevitably omit scores of worthy candidates. As examples, I noted that Honus Wagner and Myron Cope—two figures related to items my grandmother had recently sent me—would have to be in the conversation.

Ben announced that he was retiring to his trailer for the night, which inspired us all to rise and do our level-best to tidy up the area around the table before calling it a night. Somewhere in the process of moving our empty cans to the recycling bin in the buffer zone between our kitchen and front door, Ian spotted an empty bottle of Evan Williams in there and asked if it was the same one Bridger had bought when they were in town the day before. Bridger admitted it was. We were all silent for a long moment while Ben, Ian, and I exchanged looks, quietly trying to gauge who among us wanted to take the lead on that one.

“And I’m 100% aware that’s not healthy,” Bridger spoke up before any of us could speak. It reaffirmed something I’d learned from my brother. People can be surprisingly forthcoming about their habits when the setup is non-confrontational—which was nearly impossible to pull off outside of rare scenarios like that one where the person using owned up to it on their own terms.

“Bridger, can I ask how long this has been going on? Months? Years?” I asked.

“Not years. Maybe a year. I’ve been taking empty bottles to recycle outside. I knew that we’d have to get into it like this if they just piled up in here. I spaced on that one.”

“This is going to sound weird, but I have something upstairs I want you to have,” I said to Bridger. “It might not help, but it might.”

We said good night to Ben when he left the Rain Shadow and Ian and Bridger followed me upstairs. They were subdued this time, nothing like the urgent footfalls that reliably trailed me each time I entered the house when I first got to the Rain Shadow in June.

Ian and Bridger were comfortable enough in my room at that point that they didn’t wait to be told to come in. They just followed me. I’d accepted that their relationships to their respective bedrooms was more to the tune of their relationship to the cabin. They were like crypts: dirty places reserved for sleeping, not suitable for waking activity. As such, any conversations we had outside of the ground-level common areas of the Rain Shadow happened in my room. I’d once naively asked why my room was the de facto upstairs board room only to be told, in rather innocent terms, by Bridger and Ian that their rooms were gross. From what I’d seen, I supposed they weren’t wrong.

I grabbed the paper bag Pete had given me earlier off my dresser and gave it to Bridger, who’d sat down next to Ian on my bed. I’m sure Bridger already suspected what was in the bag, but he still looked puzzled once he’d unfolded the top to open it and look inside. “Have I just been given psychedelics from MacKenzie-fucking-Callahan?”

“Compliments of Pete. You can do what you want with those, but I’m going to give you Tully’s number.”

“Your astro-therapist person?” Bridger took his phone from a velcro side pocket of the lightweight, South American-style pants with vertical stripes he had on.

“Yeah,” I said, looking for my last email with Tully to copy and paste her number from her signature into a message to Bridger. “She might know somebody with experience facilitating addiction treatment sessions with psychedelics if you’re interested. Supposedly, it has good success for alcoholics.” After I sent the message with Tully’s number, I told Bridger he could also just use the psilocybin on his own if he wanted. Ian excused himself to use the bathroom and I sat down on my bed next to Bridger.

“Thanks for these,” he said, putting the paper bag aside. “I’ll probably call her. I’ve sort of been wanting to get into astrology, so maybe this is the time to start.”

“Yeah, that’s bullshit,” I said. “You’re a suggested contact on my Co–Star app. It looks like you’ve already ‘gotten into’ it.”

He clumsily defended that he meant he wanted to get into it in a more formal way, but then confessed he also hadn’t known that the app recognized who in your phone’s contacts were also using the app. I had laid down somewhere in there and Bridger had done the same, both with our lower legs still hanging from the edge of the bed. He asked where he had to look in the app to see where the contacts it recognized from his phone would appear, so I showed him.

“Has it been worth it?”

“Co-Star?”

“Seeing Tully.”

“Honestly, she hasn’t asked me to pay anything for any of it. But I think it’d be worth it still if she did, yeah. Like, you guys are great and all and I love that we all shoot straight with each other. You, Ian, and Ben have really surprised me that way. The way the last few years have gone, I think this is probably the best situation I could’ve ended up in. But talking with Tully’s a different thing.”

We were silent for a while after that—long enough that I realized Ian was still in the bathroom when I felt Bridger shift next to me. I assumed he was just going to sit up, but he didn’t change his body’s position—just the position of his right hand. Though it was clear he’d tried to be discreet about it, it was also clear that the placement—near my inner thigh, below my left hip—was calculated.

“Ew. Not you, too.” I realized I sounded more moody than angry or violated. That was probably a faithful reflection of my general outlook in those weeks. Even though I was feeling less and less nihilistic by the day, I still got cranky about a range of bullshit that included being hit on. I thought of Barack Obama doing the unimpressed face with McKayla Maroney. Or Greta Thunberg regarding the piece of shit that was then the sitting president.

He withdrew his hand and sat up. “I’m s—”

“Just don’t fucking do that again, please. I already went through this with Ian this summer.” The timing of me saying that was such that Ian overheard as he came out of the bathroom and started walking back to my room.

“Oh, shit! Did Bridger just come onto you, Callahan?”

Bridger, visibly humiliated, reached for a pillow and covered his face.

“Hey, bud, there’s no way you embarrassed yourself harder than I did. I tried to bait her on our first hitch. That’s when she had me do the psychological distancing thing for the first time. I think I’ve made a lot of progress with myself since then, right?” Ian looked at me for affirmation.

I had stood up next to Ian and shrugged, honestly unsure what he defined as progress though it was true that he hadn’t creeped me out as profusely since. He pushed my shoulder spitefully when I didn’t give him the reaction he’d hoped for to make Bridger feel better. “Hey, Bridger,” Ian said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do a psychological distancing exercise right here.”

“For real?” I was genuinely amused by the suggestion, already looking forward to the day when I would get to tell Ayla how hard the principle caught on at the Rain Shadow that summer.

“Yeah, is there anything around here to roleplay with? Do I need to go grab Willie?”

“Willie?”

“My orca,” Ian said matter of factly while still scanning the room. I tried to cache that image away so I’d always be able to remember that I’d seen a grown-ass cishet dude say he’d named a plush orca Willie if I ever needed a pick-me-up. He looked like he was ready to book it down the hall for Willie when I stopped him.

“I think I have something. Hold on.” I reached underneath my bed just below where Bridger’s legs still hung and slid out the box from my grandmother. Bridger sat up and asked what we were going to make him do. I clarified that we couldn’t make him do anything, but held the Honus Wagner card and the photograph of my grandma and her parents facing him. “But if you want to try this out, you get to pick which one of these you want to be.”

“I’ll be Honus,” Bridger said, reaching for me to hand the card to him, less reluctantly than I would’ve guessed. “Are we going to do this with Ian here?”

“I don’t know, are we?” I said, sitting cross-legged on the floor and looking at Ian standing behind me, then back at Bridger, who eventually assured us that he didn’t care and Ian could stay. Ian sat down on the floor next to me, both of us facing Bridger still sitting above us on my bed.

I held the framed photo of my ancestors facing Bridger, and said in what was probably a soft, kitschy voice, “Hi, Honus.”

“Hi…” Bridger had started in a different voice, but then squinted and slipped into his normal speaking voice. “Which one am I talking to?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll talk to the guy.”

“Oskar, then. He had the shortest life of all of them. This will be good—a man-to-man talk.”

He nodded, then went back to the roleplaying voice. “Hiya, Oskar.”

“Rumor has it that Bridger guy tried to come onto one of my great grandkids and has been drinking more than he wants to.”

“That’s true. Both parts. And he’s sorry.” Bridger was quite still and looked at the floor while holding the Wagner card facing me and Ian.

“Say, Honus, would you tell him not to be so down about it? It’s not a big deal. MacKenzie knows Bridger’s doing the best he can. She still likes the kid. Plus, everybody knows being 22 sucks. Take it from me, I’m not much older and I’m going to die in Russia any day now.”

“That sucks,” Bridger said through Honus. “I like your jacket. It kind of looks like a dress.”

Bridger looked at us, at which point I was struck by how fucking ridiculous Ian and I probably looked sitting down on the floor, peering from behind a photograph at our visibly rattled coworker. Ben had really missed out on some next-level peculiarity by turning in when he did.

“It’s a military-issued uniform. I didn’t pick it out, but thanks. I should probably get going, seeing as I’m the subject of an authoritarian regime and am going to die soon and all. Auf wiedersehen.”

“Hey, before you go, can you tell MacKenzie something for Bridger?”

“What’s that, Honus?”

“Tell her Bridger says, ‘it’s you I like.’” Bridger looked at the Wagner card before handing it back to me and speaking in his normal voice again. “I wanted to make Honus say like, ‘I feel you, my kraut brother, I’m already dead,’ just because I know he’d technically be older, but I’m guessing he outlived Oskar.”

I said he had. Honus Wagner didn’t die until the 50s. Before either of us could ask, Bridger admitted that the whole exercise had helped, but he wasn’t sure if it was cathartic so much as a strange distraction. I couldn’t think of a strong case one way or the other, but I wondered if the two things were one in the same sometimes.

Bridger yawned and started something of an Italian goodbye, taking the bag of psychedelics and saying that he was going to head to bed before proceeding to talk with us for another several minutes. He asked if he had correctly understood that the people in the photo were my grandma and her parents and then we got on the topic of my family—specifically my brother once I mentioned that he was an addict. When they asked what his current status was, I mentioned the double-parlay bet on Elliott staying clean and in Challis that Pete and I had joked about.

“You think he kicked everything because your dad died?” Bridger asked.

“Pete thinks so. It’s not unheard of. Psychedelics can supposedly do the same thing—like they can affect the brain the same way as significant experiences like childbirth and death. Apparently, a lot of people change their behaviors when somebody close to them dies.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s a real thing,” Bridger said. “My parents—they were never married—but they lived together until I was in fifth grade. They haven’t been in touch for a long time, but they live in a small town, so when my mom got cancer, my dad heard. That was, like, three years ago and I was home from my first year of college for the summer. I had brought him up to Mom, just out of the blue, and she said she’d heard he’d been sober for a few months. He hasn’t drank since. I asked him about it and he just kind of deflected and said he just lost his taste for it.”

When we said we were sorry about his mom, Bridger clarified that she was okay after all that, which made me feel less weird about retelling what had happened with my mother.

“Jesus Christ,” Ian said. “You said that thing was marketed as a fertility drug?”

I nodded. “I mean, it’s always the synthetic shit we make that causes cancer, isn’t it?” Of course, the irony surrounding DES was deeply upsetting. The FDA approved a drug to help prevent miscarriages. Some of those same babies who had been carried to term then had a host of reproductive health complications as adults. I didn’t know if my mother’s fate was at all common, but the optics of a DES daughter later dying in part because of a planned pregnancy were tough.

“I know it’s not always the case, but it really seems like it,” Bridger said, huffing before getting up to actually call it a night. He thanked me one more time for the psychedelics before walking out the door and down the hall to his room. The sprawling ground we had covered in this whole exchange since the Evan Williams bottle in recycling would’ve been confounding in most settings. But such was living in close quarters with other humans in remote places. You knew each other’s business. You bonded at an accelerated pace. You could completely fuck up by each other, but you still had to see each other the next day.