The octopus stole the show that first morning in Black Rock City. Michael had already seen it online, spewing fire at night, tentacles flailing ominously. It had been an awesome sight in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but somehow it had not prepared him for the high comedy of the great beast in daylight, this eye-rolling assemblage of garbage cans nodding to its fans like a showgirl in a supermarket.
“El Pulpo Mecanico,” said Ben, as the octopus sashayed past their enclosure in its own churning ecosystem of dust.
“Marcus Bachmann,” Michael suggested.
Ben chuckled and returned to the task of assembling their camp stove. He was wearing the “cruelty-free” loincloth he had made at home. It was basically a string with a faux buckskin flap that managed to cover the crown of his dick while successfully containing nothing whatsoever. Michael was wearing his purple Etsy nightshirt. It had been custom-made for him by a seamstress in Turkey named Yosma, whose husband, a short, burly daddy with a mustache, had modeled this style next to a concrete Venus in their backyard. In their Etsy “convo” Michael had been tempted to tell Yosma (in the name of global goodwill) that his husband found her husband kind of hot, but Ben had nixed the idea as soon as Michael playfully proposed it. Words embarrassed Ben more than nudity ever could.
“Omigod, guys, you have to try Mystopia!” This was Shawna, with a childlike Christmas-morning madness in her dark brown eyes. Michael could see her mother there, the endearingly daffy Connie Bradshaw, who died a day after giving birth to Shawna. He would always regard Brian as Shawna’s only functioning parent, but Connie lived on in Shawna’s animated features and breathless delivery.
“What’s Mystopia?”
“It’s one of the camps—this lounge where they spray you with mist. Fucking heaven!”
“I dunno,” said Michael, searching for the sunglass lenses to his goggles. “I’m not sure I wanna be washed by strangers.”
“They don’t wash you, they mist you. Like a big Evian spray bottle.”
“He’s thinking of the Human Carcass Wash,” said Ben.
“Ah,” said Michael. “So I am.”
“You’d be able to tell the difference,” said Shawna. “At the Carcass Wash you have to wash other people before they wash you.”
“Isn’t that always the way,” said Michael.
He found the lenses in a plastic storage box and, after some effort, popped them into his goggles. Now all he needed was his nuclear-strength sunblock, his purple boots for the bicycle, the right silk scarf for the nightshirt, his CamelBak filled with water, his stovepipe hat, and . . . what else? He should have made a checklist for every step of this transformational journey to radical self-expression.
“You know what would be nice?” he said. “If you could just fly into here without the six-hour traffic jam. You could land right on the playa . . . have a fully stocked RV just waiting for you, with delicious meals and killer costumes and everything you need. Then you’d be free to wander and find your bliss.”
Shawna gaped at him as if he’d just proposed genocide. “Ewww.”
“They have that already,” Ben told him. “It’s called plug and play.”
“And that’s a bad thing because—”
“Because . . . you have to earn this experience,” said Shawna. “Radical self-reliance is part of the deal. We’re leaving the default world behind.”
“Meaning everything that’s not here?”
“Yes.”
“And plug and play is just a bunch of CEOs and Republicans,” Ben added.
“C’mon! Here?”
“Well, libertarians, at the very least. Rich people getting their freak on.”
“A bunch of shirtcockers,” said Shawna. “Gag me.”
“Guess I’d better ask what that is.”
“They run around in shirts with no pants.”
Michael mugged at her. “As opposed to the half dozen totally naked people painted blue I saw on my way to the porta potties this morning?”
“It’s complicated, Michael. It’s a matter of intent. And commitment.”
Michael picked up the manual with the schedule of events. “You’re right. It’s just hard to know where to start with my intent and commitment. Let’s see now . . .” He flipped through the pages, reading entries at random. “ ‘Valerie Hummingbird Birthing Your Inner Voice’ . . . ‘Cirque du Cliché Morning Soiree’ . . . ‘Kunda Your Lini’ . . . ‘Fake Jamaican Accent Hour’ . . . ‘Dr. Scrote’s Circumcision Wagon and Calamari Hut.’ ”
Ben laughed, still tinkering with the stove. “You made up that last one.”
“I swear to God.” Michael held out the manual as proof.
“That is fucking hilarious,” said Shawna.
“Maybe to you,” said Michael.
It was funny, of course, so he laughed along with them. “Forget about the stove,” he told Ben. “Let’s go find someone who’ll gift us some breakfast.”
She laughed, but gave him a faintly reproving look. “Now don’t be a Sparkle Pony.”
“I won’t,” said Michael, “and you can tell me what that is after breakfast.”
“There’s a camp on the next plaza that serves bacon and Bloody Marys.”
“I’m there,” said Michael. “Soon as I find the right scarf.”
They took their inaugural bike ride after breakfast. Michael was buzzed from the Bloody Marys, which helped to loosen him up as he attempted a bicycle for the first time in years. Fortunately, there were not that many other bikes to dodge as they pedaled down one of the clock-numbered streets toward the playa. He had not made a point of noticing street signs. He’d resolved simply to follow Ben and Shawna until he got the hang of things. He was happy to be their duckling.
“Lookin’ good, Sofa Daddy.” Shawna was shouting encouragement over her shoulder. It was hard to imagine her not looking good in anything, which in this case included a pink halter top, a pink tutu, and clunky boots trimmed in pink faux fur. It made her easy to spot whenever she briefly wove out of sight. His other reference point, his husband, was a brown leather bowler above a sun-freckled back. He had swapped out the loincloth for a pair of shimmering (and sheer) green harem pants.
And so it went for the duckling—pink, green, pink, green—until they reached the broad crescent-shaped esplanade bordering the playa. There, without warning, he was swept into a perfect storm of vehicles: hundreds, maybe thousands, of bikes and art cars, some of them as enormous as tractor trailers and crammed with naked pagans, others small and troublesome, darting out of nowhere, tricked out like land sharks or Blinky from Pac-Man or chattering false teeth or cocks. This was not good. His time-honored ineptitude could do serious damage here—and not just to himself.
He flashed on the night he reunited with roller skates as an adult. He had zombie-walked his way into a rink in South City on a newly created “gay night,” only to cruise another guy so intensely that he crashed into him and drew blood. It had been his blood, at least—the usual bloody nose—and they had gone home together afterward, he and this beautiful doctor, this gynecologist, for God’s sake. They’d had six good years with each other, off and on—six glorious years—before Jon had been erased by a horror so new that it had only just been given a name.
So, how am I lookin’, Dr. Fielding?
What do you make of this old man in his nightshirt and top hat?
Am I grateful enough to still be here?
This rumination was all it took for him to lose sight of Ben and Shawna. Panicked, he began to wobble wildly on the bike, clutching the handlebars just the way you’re not supposed to, before braking and dismounting in the middle of the traffic in full expectation of calamity. To his amazement, the other bikers parted around him with nonchalant grace, like skiers avoiding a tree. No one even yelled. Maybe the silver mustache helped. Maybe he’d just been the lucky recipient of Radical Geezer Tolerance or some other immutable principle of Burning Man.
He pushed his bike to the other side of the esplanade. Pink and Green were waiting for him in the relative openness of the playa.
“Are you okay?” asked Ben.
“I’m fine. Just had to stop for a second.”
“It gets easier up ahead,” Ben told him.
It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead.
Even when it might not be true.
This time, though, it was. The deep playa freed them from the crush of others, and soon the three of them—just the three of them—were racing across a hard platinum plain under the noonday sun, scarves streaming like banners, arms held aloft like Evita, or the queens in Priscilla. The arm thing, of course, was mostly Ben and Shawna’s contribution, though Michael shared their exhilaration. He had never ridden a bike with such sustained abandon. He felt like one of those kids from ET, lifting off into the sky while the orchestra swelled accordingly.
At the moment they were heading toward three enormous letters—EGO—floating in the hazy beige of the horizon. This was their third art installation of the morning, after the Hand Holding the Fish and the Shipwreck, and all of them had appeared as mirages demanding investigation. The dust had a way of doing that, of teasing with its veils. So now they were off in pursuit of the giant EGO—the superego, as it were—and Ben was shouting something over his shoulder. It sounded to Michael like “loose hand,” which he found disturbing, though not particularly informative.
The explanation came from the playa itself, when his wheels hit a patch of alkali powder—“loose sand”—that brought his bike to a dead halt,
Just. Like. That.
He hit the playa hard, but of course it was “loose” in that spot, not the cracked, unyielding pavement that made bike riding such a breeze. He had been spared by the very thing that brought him down. Had he been on some suitably friendly drug, he might have pondered that paradox for a while, lying there in the desert’s silky embrace, but he felt filthy and achy and, yes, embarrassed, even among family. He sat up to prove that he wasn’t dead. He was still sitting there, slurping from his CamelBak, when Ben and Shawna pushed their bikes onto the scene.
“I give up,” he said with a crooked smile.
“Now you’re getting it,” said Shawna.
He laughed. They all laughed. Surrender had been the theme of her Burning Man orientation. He wondered, though, if she was also referring to something else.
A blue moon was on the way, after all. There was fertilizing to be done.
After the bike trip, Shawna went to visit her friends at Chakralicious, so Ben and Michael returned to their tent for a nap. Ben’s youth—and, okay, sure, his natural athleticism—made him more active than Michael, but he insisted on an afternoon nap. Michael was grateful for that. Not to mention Ben’s love of a quality air mattress. The entire floor of the tent was thick, cushioned relief from the playa.
It was too warm to cuddle, so they lay side by side with their feet touching, listening to the murmurs of siesta time. Michael was still fretting over Shawna’s dreams of a playa pregnancy, so he approached the subject head-on.
“Did you get a chance to talk to her?”
Ben knew what he meant and, thankfully, did not pretend otherwise. “There haven’t been that many chances, honey.”
“I thought maybe when we were on the Shipwreck.” Michael had waited in the captain’s cabin, slightly nauseous from the heat and the crazily tilting decks, while Ben and Shawna went off to explore the rigging. They had been gone long enough for him to start feeling one with the tableau, as if he were the captain himself, every bit as dusty and abandoned as the old maps and sea chests surrounding him.
“That was hardly enough time,” Ben told him.
“How long does it take to say thanks but no thanks . . . and I’m sorry my tactless husband didn’t handle this as well as he should have?”
Michael had hoped for a smile, but all he got was another question:
“And you’re sure that’s what I want to say?”
The uncharacteristic sarcasm in Ben’s tone stung Michael. He kept his gaze on the dome of the tent for fear of what he might find in Ben’s eyes.
“Tell me then,” he said calmly. “Tell me what you feel.”
“Now he asks,” said Ben, as if he were talking to someone else.
There was a loud gas-jet roar somewhere outside the tent. Michael recognized it as the octopus, shooting flames for the sheer, frivolous hell of it.
“You don’t want to have a baby with her, do you?”
Ben took a moment to answer. “Having a baby with her and giving her the chance to have one are two different things.”
“No, sweetie. They aren’t. She’s not going anywhere. She’ll still be a part of our lives. It will be your baby, no matter what kind of spin you put on it.”
“She doesn’t expect me to parent,” said Ben “Or you or anyone else. She’s been really clear about that.”
“Do you really want a baby around? Do you want that sort of life?”
Ben sighed. “There’s going to be a baby around no matter who fathers it. She wants to do this, and she’s a part of our lives. You said so yourself.”
“And you just said ‘fathers.’ ”
“What?”
“ ‘No matter who fathers it’ is what you just said. You would be that baby’s father, Ben. There’s no two ways about it.”
A long, brooding silence before Ben finally said, “Haven’t you ever thought about having a kid?”
He asked it so earnestly that Michael tried to answer accordingly.
“Not since I knew how it felt to be in love. That was all I wanted after that. That’s all I want now.”
Ben rolled on his side, his face golden in tent-filtered sun. “Seriously, you’ve never imagined it.”
“Oh . . . well . . . imagined it, sure. In my early teens. But it was just to give them cool names. I had a Zachary and an Atticus, as I recall. I had a Tallulah decades before Bruce and Demi thought of it.”
Ben gave him a drowsy smile. “Tallulah Tolliver? Really?”
Michael smiled back. “I know. If you say it fast enough, it becomes an al-Qaeda war cry.”
They had moved off topic, but Ben seemed as glad about that as Michael was. And Michael knew that Ben would commit to nothing, spermwise, unless Michael had agreed upon it. Such was the nature of their marriage.
“Let’s grab a snooze,” Ben said, taking Michael’s hand.
As he drifted into sleep, it occurred to Michael that Brian might be the only person who could talk some sense into Ben and Shawna. Her own father, after all, would understand how this arrangement would be a familial minefield. But Brian wasn’t here. He was somewhere north of here, holed up with his new bride in an air-conditioned RV, taking Mrs. Madrigal on a cryptic Trip to Bountiful.