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 shouted 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
“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 shouted 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
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