Twink Country, Bear Country
by Pathikrit
I was working mornings as a barista that summer, shooting steam through lukewarm milk in lieu of flying to India with my mother. My second job, at the university co-op, involved stacking the shelves with secondhand textbooks, slapping the spines with USED SAVES! stickers. Campus was deserted; only the grackles remained. My dorm overlooked the Student Union, a nice enough building that was once again under renovation. Who was funding it? Was it a scam? These were questions I sometimes considered. My loans had swelled to five figures already. My father was dead of a very expensive cancer. I was sad half the time, horny the rest. I had opted out of health insurance back in August.
Under such circumstances I crossed paths with D. That’s what he called himself on the proximity-based hook-up app I fired up most nights: THE REAL D, 3000 FEET AWAY. He was a self-described twink—not my type exactly, which gave me confidence. In my opening remarks I wondered what the letter D stood for: “D as in deal? D as in dinosaur? D as in dreamboat? D as in domination?” I was communicating my needs. To my surprise he played along: “D as in dick, obviously.” He was a rising junior just like me; also from Houston, Woodlands to my Sugar Land. We dicked in my dorm later that night, no butt stuff but it was thirsty. Afterward he left (rather abruptly I thought), so I walked the half-mile up Guadelupe alone and ordered animal fries at In-N-Out.
At the cafe the next morning, I was unloading the dishwasher in the back when my coworker Meg (Om tattoo, septum piercing) cried, “Iced cappuccino for D?” I took my time re-shelving the mugs. I unpacked the day’s deliveries next, stowed cartons of Barista Blend. When at last I appeared through the doorway, there he was, seated at the counter. Right away he confessed he had hunted me down via triangulation on the hook-up app. Those were his words: hunt down, triangulation. I was creeped out for sure, but I also felt excited. He wanted to go old-school, D said, stammering a little. Seducing the barista was a fantasy of his. He drained his drink and ordered another.
After work the next evening we took a walk along the river. It was the middle of June, slap-in-the-face hot. The cormorants stood panting. A foul wind rubbed along the surface of the water. I didn’t talk much; I was feeling sad again. It was D who told me things. His veganism: ethical and environmental reasons, going strong on seven years. Also his job, which he called research. For fifteen dollars an hour (six more than I made) he was washing ancient sediment for the geology department and using it to reconstruct trends in ancient weather. Paleoclimatology, he called it. Later that evening I consulted the hook-up app: D hadn’t opened it in thirty-six hours.
With my permission he began visiting me daily, always the cafe, never the co-op (my manager was a grump). Most mornings he came bearing a gift: a vegan brownie, a pair of sunflowers. Installed at the counter he talked to me in spurts, as my work allowed. The rest of the time he click-clacked at his laptop. He was working on a manifesto, D said—one that would bring together activists of all different stripes. His working title was Citizen Climate Consensus. Greta Thunberg was too angry, AOC too political. In their stead he peddled a rosy folk wisdom: the human race was essentially good. As evidence he cited a study out of Los Angeles, something to do with a missing cat.
On the hook-up app D’s pics were all ribs and skin, a sunken chest. Our first night that image had been reinforced in my mind, but now he began to effect a transformation: meat to the bone, chonk to the cheeks. His nose cut a regal angle. His wavy brown hair fell to his jaw. In bed he said the most startling things. “Come caress my flesh.” “Unsheathe thy Excalibur.” As for the questions he posed, they tended to be trite, as if borrowed from a handbook. What was my earliest memory? My favorite animal? My definition of success? My greatest fear? “Death,” I said, and what about him? “Climate apocalypse, ecological collapse.” He was weird in a good way. Earnest and kind. His concern for the planet was moving at times. I also liked that I made him nervous.
D lived off campus, in an apartment downtown. Nineteenth floor, art on the walls. On the shoe rack by the door sat a tureen of quarters. His parents were clearly loaded but he seemed indifferent to it. He shopped at thrift stores, walked or biked everywhere; his phone was all banged up. Culture dictated dates at fancy restaurants, yet his favorite thing was to cook me dinner. Tofu curry, beet burgers, soba noodles topped with scallion. The flavors were hit-or-miss but the gesture was really sweet—borderline annoying. Once in a while I would sleep over at his place. Usually though, I returned to my dorm, stopping at Chick-fil-A en route, or In-N-Out, or McDonald’s.
It wasn’t my intention to hurt D’s feelings, but I kept using the hook-up app as well. I chatted with other guys; a couple forgettable shudders. One night I noticed that D had been online too: “1 day ago.” I took this as permission to update my pictures. I told myself it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered all that much. My father was gone, our savings in tow. My mother was in the process of moving back to India. My brother, who no longer spoke to us, was a plastic surgeon in Temecula. To be clear D knew nothing of my troubles. It was hard to explain, even to myself, how a half-century of westward mobility had somehow led here.
Under such circumstances I crossed paths with D. That’s what he called himself on the proximity-based hook-up app I fired up most nights: THE REAL D, 3000 FEET AWAY. He was a self-described twink—not my type exactly, which gave me confidence. In my opening remarks I wondered what the letter D stood for: “D as in deal? D as in dinosaur? D as in dreamboat? D as in domination?” I was communicating my needs. To my surprise he played along: “D as in dick, obviously.” He was a rising junior just like me; also from Houston, Woodlands to my Sugar Land. We dicked in my dorm later that night, no butt stuff but it was thirsty. Afterward he left (rather abruptly I thought), so I walked the half-mile up Guadelupe alone and ordered animal fries at In-N-Out.
At the cafe the next morning, I was unloading the dishwasher in the back when my coworker Meg (Om tattoo, septum piercing) cried, “Iced cappuccino for D?” I took my time re-shelving the mugs. I unpacked the day’s deliveries next, stowed cartons of Barista Blend. When at last I appeared through the doorway, there he was, seated at the counter. Right away he confessed he had hunted me down via triangulation on the hook-up app. Those were his words: hunt down, triangulation. I was creeped out for sure, but I also felt excited. He wanted to go old-school, D said, stammering a little. Seducing the barista was a fantasy of his. He drained his drink and ordered another.
After work the next evening we took a walk along the river. It was the middle of June, slap-in-the-face hot. The cormorants stood panting. A foul wind rubbed along the surface of the water. I didn’t talk much; I was feeling sad again. It was D who told me things. His veganism: ethical and environmental reasons, going strong on seven years. Also his job, which he called research. For fifteen dollars an hour (six more than I made) he was washing ancient sediment for the geology department and using it to reconstruct trends in ancient weather. Paleoclimatology, he called it. Later that evening I consulted the hook-up app: D hadn’t opened it in thirty-six hours.
With my permission he began visiting me daily, always the cafe, never the co-op (my manager was a grump). Most mornings he came bearing a gift: a vegan brownie, a pair of sunflowers. Installed at the counter he talked to me in spurts, as my work allowed. The rest of the time he click-clacked at his laptop. He was working on a manifesto, D said—one that would bring together activists of all different stripes. His working title was Citizen Climate Consensus. Greta Thunberg was too angry, AOC too political. In their stead he peddled a rosy folk wisdom: the human race was essentially good. As evidence he cited a study out of Los Angeles, something to do with a missing cat.
On the hook-up app D’s pics were all ribs and skin, a sunken chest. Our first night that image had been reinforced in my mind, but now he began to effect a transformation: meat to the bone, chonk to the cheeks. His nose cut a regal angle. His wavy brown hair fell to his jaw. In bed he said the most startling things. “Come caress my flesh.” “Unsheathe thy Excalibur.” As for the questions he posed, they tended to be trite, as if borrowed from a handbook. What was my earliest memory? My favorite animal? My definition of success? My greatest fear? “Death,” I said, and what about him? “Climate apocalypse, ecological collapse.” He was weird in a good way. Earnest and kind. His concern for the planet was moving at times. I also liked that I made him nervous.
D lived off campus, in an apartment downtown. Nineteenth floor, art on the walls. On the shoe rack by the door sat a tureen of quarters. His parents were clearly loaded but he seemed indifferent to it. He shopped at thrift stores, walked or biked everywhere; his phone was all banged up. Culture dictated dates at fancy restaurants, yet his favorite thing was to cook me dinner. Tofu curry, beet burgers, soba noodles topped with scallion. The flavors were hit-or-miss but the gesture was really sweet—borderline annoying. Once in a while I would sleep over at his place. Usually though, I returned to my dorm, stopping at Chick-fil-A en route, or In-N-Out, or McDonald’s.
It wasn’t my intention to hurt D’s feelings, but I kept using the hook-up app as well. I chatted with other guys; a couple forgettable shudders. One night I noticed that D had been online too: “1 day ago.” I took this as permission to update my pictures. I told myself it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered all that much. My father was gone, our savings in tow. My mother was in the process of moving back to India. My brother, who no longer spoke to us, was a plastic surgeon in Temecula. To be clear D knew nothing of my troubles. It was hard to explain, even to myself, how a half-century of westward mobility had somehow led here.
*
The weeks dinged on, my paychecks trickled in. Summer unfurled its hot prickly tongue. As June turned to July D grew seasonally anxious. He worried for the cypresses whose limbs were dying back, for the squirrels lying spatchcocked on the ground, unable to cool down. One evening he asked if I would read his manifesto. Love thy neighbor. Love thy trees. Love thy soil, plastic, car, wrapping paper… I handed it back without getting very far. “So what do you think?” he said brightly. “Be honest!” he added, so fuck it, I was. I told him it was absurd, a farce—sort of like our fling. We hadn’t discussed what we wanted from each other. Our time together wasn’t adding up to much.
Our first fight. I was self-sabotaging I suppose, or maybe I was trying to protect D. I was a mess that summer. Sad, unstable, not exactly boyfriend material. I told him we hailed from totally different worlds. “I’m what they call South Asian, second-gen, immigrant. Meanwhile you get to be American without qualifiers.” He was a princess, I also told him. Cocooned in his privilege, passionate about obvious things, woefully blind to the struggles of working people. The whole time D said nothing, he didn’t even defend himself. By the end he resembled an overtired metaphor: a possum playing dead, a deer caught in headlights. I left him in the bedroom and showed myself out. At the door I filched a cold fistful of quarters. My tuition for the fall was due in six weeks; already I was certain there wouldn’t be enough.
The next morning D did not show at the cafe. The following day too, he failed to turn up, which led Meg, scratching her Om tattoo, to point out, “Your tree-hugger twink, he’s not here.” I could’ve texted D, could’ve gone to his apartment, but I didn’t. My mother called to cry a bit: India was harder to navigate than expected, the relatives less solicitous now that we were poor. “Actually we’re not poor, Ma,” I corrected her gently. She was single again just like me, I thought. Long hours on the hook-up app; D’s profile had gone gray, inactive. On the sixth day I discovered a letter in my campus mailbox. It was from D, dated five days earlier. Not an apology or an indictment, but an invitation. Would I pretty please go camping with him?
An impressive ruse! Growing up he had summered in the Sierras, D wrote—floated canoes down the icy Tuolumne River. The outdoors were where the magic happened. Yosemite might be two-thousand miles away, but the next best thing was Palo Duro Canyon. “It’s got a unique ecosystem that keeps the canyon floor relatively cool even when it’s hot AF.” He had included a map in the envelope, traced a route headed west. Eight hours out, eight hours back. The scenery was incredible apparently. Cathedrals of rock to scramble on, milky puddles of stars. We could find a campsite this time of year, easy. If not we could always sleep in the car. D had a car? Really? In my dreams that night the surgeons were lions feasting on my father’s carcass.
“Reach out when you’re ready,” D had written at the end. I reached out. I was ready. He met me outside the co-op after work. We hugged for a while in the merciful shade. He took my arm and thanked me profusely. For what? My feedback, my bluntness, for giving us a second chance. Another walk along the soupy calm lake. We ended up at his place. There D confessed he had thrown out his manifesto and restarted it from scratch. Also, would I stay the night? I wasn’t heartless, I couldn’t say no. In bed with him in that skyview apartment, I pushed against a shameful fantasy—marrying him for his parents’ money—while he started in on the pillowtalk. “You’re my banana, I’m your peanut butter—” “That’s disgusting!” I laughed.
We began spending our evenings as before: kicking back, eating vegan. I often caught D looking at me. I had the sense that he looked at me whenever he could, that it made him happy to look. Ear to my stomach he heard it growling; he said it reminded him of the ocean. August rolled around. The asphalt turned sticky, the earth cracked open, the Student Union revealed its shiny new facade. It was D who circled back to Palo Duro Canyon. He wasn’t bluffing; was I still down? I had never gone camping before, which thrilled him even more. He sent me two videos to watch, one about hydration and another about blisters. “I will protect you,” he said between the sheets. From what? “From everything!” He was in it, he was interested, he was trying not to send mixed signals.
Four days—that’s all I was able to take off. “Watch out for the rattlesnakes,” my boss at the co-op warned me. All Meg said was, “Wait, that’s awesome.” Neither of them cared where I went; I reminded myself I didn’t care either. On the morning of our trip I wrote the university billing office asking for an extension. I didn’t have the money, I needed more time. I described my family’s struggles a bit, then added a detail I hadn’t told anyone: “Years ago my parents took me to the Sun Temple in Konarak. Its walls are covered in sex-positive sculptures, the kinds of sex no longer acceptable in our culture, and in the altar of that temple, I prayed for my parents’ death because that meant never having to come out to them, ever.” Some might say I was playing the diversity card.
Our first fight. I was self-sabotaging I suppose, or maybe I was trying to protect D. I was a mess that summer. Sad, unstable, not exactly boyfriend material. I told him we hailed from totally different worlds. “I’m what they call South Asian, second-gen, immigrant. Meanwhile you get to be American without qualifiers.” He was a princess, I also told him. Cocooned in his privilege, passionate about obvious things, woefully blind to the struggles of working people. The whole time D said nothing, he didn’t even defend himself. By the end he resembled an overtired metaphor: a possum playing dead, a deer caught in headlights. I left him in the bedroom and showed myself out. At the door I filched a cold fistful of quarters. My tuition for the fall was due in six weeks; already I was certain there wouldn’t be enough.
The next morning D did not show at the cafe. The following day too, he failed to turn up, which led Meg, scratching her Om tattoo, to point out, “Your tree-hugger twink, he’s not here.” I could’ve texted D, could’ve gone to his apartment, but I didn’t. My mother called to cry a bit: India was harder to navigate than expected, the relatives less solicitous now that we were poor. “Actually we’re not poor, Ma,” I corrected her gently. She was single again just like me, I thought. Long hours on the hook-up app; D’s profile had gone gray, inactive. On the sixth day I discovered a letter in my campus mailbox. It was from D, dated five days earlier. Not an apology or an indictment, but an invitation. Would I pretty please go camping with him?
An impressive ruse! Growing up he had summered in the Sierras, D wrote—floated canoes down the icy Tuolumne River. The outdoors were where the magic happened. Yosemite might be two-thousand miles away, but the next best thing was Palo Duro Canyon. “It’s got a unique ecosystem that keeps the canyon floor relatively cool even when it’s hot AF.” He had included a map in the envelope, traced a route headed west. Eight hours out, eight hours back. The scenery was incredible apparently. Cathedrals of rock to scramble on, milky puddles of stars. We could find a campsite this time of year, easy. If not we could always sleep in the car. D had a car? Really? In my dreams that night the surgeons were lions feasting on my father’s carcass.
“Reach out when you’re ready,” D had written at the end. I reached out. I was ready. He met me outside the co-op after work. We hugged for a while in the merciful shade. He took my arm and thanked me profusely. For what? My feedback, my bluntness, for giving us a second chance. Another walk along the soupy calm lake. We ended up at his place. There D confessed he had thrown out his manifesto and restarted it from scratch. Also, would I stay the night? I wasn’t heartless, I couldn’t say no. In bed with him in that skyview apartment, I pushed against a shameful fantasy—marrying him for his parents’ money—while he started in on the pillowtalk. “You’re my banana, I’m your peanut butter—” “That’s disgusting!” I laughed.
We began spending our evenings as before: kicking back, eating vegan. I often caught D looking at me. I had the sense that he looked at me whenever he could, that it made him happy to look. Ear to my stomach he heard it growling; he said it reminded him of the ocean. August rolled around. The asphalt turned sticky, the earth cracked open, the Student Union revealed its shiny new facade. It was D who circled back to Palo Duro Canyon. He wasn’t bluffing; was I still down? I had never gone camping before, which thrilled him even more. He sent me two videos to watch, one about hydration and another about blisters. “I will protect you,” he said between the sheets. From what? “From everything!” He was in it, he was interested, he was trying not to send mixed signals.
Four days—that’s all I was able to take off. “Watch out for the rattlesnakes,” my boss at the co-op warned me. All Meg said was, “Wait, that’s awesome.” Neither of them cared where I went; I reminded myself I didn’t care either. On the morning of our trip I wrote the university billing office asking for an extension. I didn’t have the money, I needed more time. I described my family’s struggles a bit, then added a detail I hadn’t told anyone: “Years ago my parents took me to the Sun Temple in Konarak. Its walls are covered in sex-positive sculptures, the kinds of sex no longer acceptable in our culture, and in the altar of that temple, I prayed for my parents’ death because that meant never having to come out to them, ever.” Some might say I was playing the diversity card.
*
We drove eight hours in D’s swanky Lexus. A hand-me-down from his mother, he explained, embarrassed. We talked, pumped music; also a dreary audiobook about mushrooms—driver’s choice. Riding shotgun I checked my phone now and then, like a zombie. I dipped into the hook-up app at one point. If D noticed he said nothing. On the highway we passed billboards about Jesus, guns, the right to life, canine adoption. “Even dogs have more rights than women in this state,” I said, kicking off a sorry debate. Dogs could get abortions sure, but could they really choose? They were bought and sold like property, bred for desirable traits. “And let’s not forget about kill shelters,” D added as we pulled into a rest stop. I paid for the gas to feel better about myself. Angling for a further boost I bought a sleeve of bison jerky and slipped it into my backpack.
The scenery changed as D predicted it would: oak to sage, farm to scrub. We were tailgated by a pickup for fifteen nervy minutes. An hour later we were veering off the highway, descending into a theater of rock. The cliffs leaned close with their terracotta skirts. We slowed the car to the required twenty-five. A roadrunner crossed ahead of us, then a suicidal jackrabbit. A baby-faced park ranger ushered us inside. D was determined to ease me into camping. He pitched our tent six feet from the car, fifty feet from the bathrooms, shaded by a snarled old juniper. The fire pit’s grate was shaped like the state. On it we cooked portobello mushrooms, Brussels sprouts wrapped in foil. Post-sunset the heat vanished quickly. In our sleeping bags D pulled me close saying, “You have a heart of gold and the body of a pornstar.”
The next morning we parked our car in the valley, hiked three miles through the canyon to the hoodoos upriver. It was warm, bright, sticky—what my father might have called hapoosh-hupoosh weather. I explained what that meant to D: “They’re the sounds you hear when swimming in a pond, head sloshing, nose spraying, giant wet gulps of air. Hapoosh-hupoosh! The Bangla language is beautiful that way, my father taught me expressions for all sorts of things. Torrential rain is jhom-jhom, a drizzle is tip-tip, knocking is tthok-tthok, shining is jhik-jhik, whispering is phish-phish…” At some point I realized I was talking about my father, thinking about him too—not the cancer-battered version but his earlier whole self—and D was right behind me, listening intently. I must have fallen quiet because he asked me what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said. For the first time I meant it. Nothing was wrong—not at that moment. I was wearing the right shoes, the right hat, the right shades. I was grateful for the sweat, grateful for the few stray tears that crept down unobserved.
The hoodoos, when we arrived, were impressively tall, crimson in the light, jutting out above a shock of vegetation. “The French call them demoiselles coiffées, literally young ladies with their hair done up,” D said. He held forth on the geology next: sandstone, shale, ripple marks, cross-bedding. Then I kissed him on the mouth, and not just to shut him up. The afternoon was sauna hot. We were the only ones on the trail. Not knowing what to do with ourselves, we peeled off our clothes, underwear too, and waded into the muddy still river. The water was cool; it came up to our waist. We scooped sediment off the bed and slathered it on each other. The technical term was wallowing, D said—not the sad human kind, but the jubilant animal variety. Mud on skin conferred all sorts of benefits. At our primal best we were one with the buffaloes, the pigs, the rhinos, the elephants. I was laughing; we both were. Later we would wonder why the bear hadn’t heard us.
The river was a steep downhill scramble from the trail. We had stashed our possessions behind a boulder up the bank. Around lunchtime I offered to fetch us some granola bars. In fact I had a secret plan: sneak a strip of jerky undetected. I sidled past a wispy tall bush, went up and over a pile of downed logs. I could no longer see D, he could no longer see me, and that was when I spotted the bear. The wild kind. Straight too, I presume. My first impression was a pile of grackles—a shiny feathery heap of black. Thirty feet away at most, riffling through our stuff. Noticing me the bear startled. It cocked, then flattened its ears; stuck out its lower lip, flashed the roots of its death-yellow canines. In my terror I did not run. Instead I turned into my most cowardly self—or perhaps it was my bravest self. I called to D, cried out for help. I wanted to live, wanted to be saved. I did not want to die.
Black bears are rarely aggressive, I would later learn—also vanishingly rare in the area. Ours was the first sighting in Palo Duro in close to fifty years. In time I would learn other things too: the university would bump up my aid just so; my mother back in India would rediscover her god; my own grief would mellow from one season to the next. As for D, among his many talents, he was a certified first responder, specially trained for run-ins with wildlife. That afternoon he came around the boulder yelling, “Hey bear! Hey bear!” His voice was so deep, so manly. He squinted at the animal in wonder. He gathered himself up, raised his arms above his head. He was full frontal, as was I. His abs glistened in their washboard glory, his pale groomed genitals were flecked with mud.
For a time the bear just stood there and stared. Then it was huffing, snorting, swatting the ground with its paws. Meanwhile D carried on in his baritone: “We have to act big! Project strength! Let him know who’s boss—” He interpreted the bear’s actions in real time. “It’s a juvenile male! Stressed! Threatened! Hungry, probably! Midsummer is peak scarcity in these parts! It’ll eat whatever I guess! Do you have anything aromatic in your bag? Sunscreen! Toothpaste! Lip balm—” Soon D began repeating himself. “Hey bear!” he kept yelling. A couple times I tried to join in, but my voice was a squeak—more harm than good. I stood there and just waved my arms.
D was running out of things to say, I feared, but then he remembered about his manifesto. He started in on the latest revision. Love was too simple; his new thing was respect. Respect the earth. Respect the oceans. Respect fossil fuels, mosquitoes, volcanoes, the Sun, D yelled, while I, who knew next to nothing about bears, noticed a slight shift. The bear would balk a little, flinch almost, every time D said respect. Something about the fricative? Again I attempted speech: “Respect space, respect distance, respect secrets, respect time.” And D kept going too. “Respect marsh gas, respect steak houses, respect video games, respect Republicans…”
Finally the bear lowered its gaze. In its infinite wisdom it picked up my backpack—jerky and all, but nothing so important—then lumbered off into the thickets, leaving us both to figure things out.
The scenery changed as D predicted it would: oak to sage, farm to scrub. We were tailgated by a pickup for fifteen nervy minutes. An hour later we were veering off the highway, descending into a theater of rock. The cliffs leaned close with their terracotta skirts. We slowed the car to the required twenty-five. A roadrunner crossed ahead of us, then a suicidal jackrabbit. A baby-faced park ranger ushered us inside. D was determined to ease me into camping. He pitched our tent six feet from the car, fifty feet from the bathrooms, shaded by a snarled old juniper. The fire pit’s grate was shaped like the state. On it we cooked portobello mushrooms, Brussels sprouts wrapped in foil. Post-sunset the heat vanished quickly. In our sleeping bags D pulled me close saying, “You have a heart of gold and the body of a pornstar.”
The next morning we parked our car in the valley, hiked three miles through the canyon to the hoodoos upriver. It was warm, bright, sticky—what my father might have called hapoosh-hupoosh weather. I explained what that meant to D: “They’re the sounds you hear when swimming in a pond, head sloshing, nose spraying, giant wet gulps of air. Hapoosh-hupoosh! The Bangla language is beautiful that way, my father taught me expressions for all sorts of things. Torrential rain is jhom-jhom, a drizzle is tip-tip, knocking is tthok-tthok, shining is jhik-jhik, whispering is phish-phish…” At some point I realized I was talking about my father, thinking about him too—not the cancer-battered version but his earlier whole self—and D was right behind me, listening intently. I must have fallen quiet because he asked me what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said. For the first time I meant it. Nothing was wrong—not at that moment. I was wearing the right shoes, the right hat, the right shades. I was grateful for the sweat, grateful for the few stray tears that crept down unobserved.
The hoodoos, when we arrived, were impressively tall, crimson in the light, jutting out above a shock of vegetation. “The French call them demoiselles coiffées, literally young ladies with their hair done up,” D said. He held forth on the geology next: sandstone, shale, ripple marks, cross-bedding. Then I kissed him on the mouth, and not just to shut him up. The afternoon was sauna hot. We were the only ones on the trail. Not knowing what to do with ourselves, we peeled off our clothes, underwear too, and waded into the muddy still river. The water was cool; it came up to our waist. We scooped sediment off the bed and slathered it on each other. The technical term was wallowing, D said—not the sad human kind, but the jubilant animal variety. Mud on skin conferred all sorts of benefits. At our primal best we were one with the buffaloes, the pigs, the rhinos, the elephants. I was laughing; we both were. Later we would wonder why the bear hadn’t heard us.
The river was a steep downhill scramble from the trail. We had stashed our possessions behind a boulder up the bank. Around lunchtime I offered to fetch us some granola bars. In fact I had a secret plan: sneak a strip of jerky undetected. I sidled past a wispy tall bush, went up and over a pile of downed logs. I could no longer see D, he could no longer see me, and that was when I spotted the bear. The wild kind. Straight too, I presume. My first impression was a pile of grackles—a shiny feathery heap of black. Thirty feet away at most, riffling through our stuff. Noticing me the bear startled. It cocked, then flattened its ears; stuck out its lower lip, flashed the roots of its death-yellow canines. In my terror I did not run. Instead I turned into my most cowardly self—or perhaps it was my bravest self. I called to D, cried out for help. I wanted to live, wanted to be saved. I did not want to die.
Black bears are rarely aggressive, I would later learn—also vanishingly rare in the area. Ours was the first sighting in Palo Duro in close to fifty years. In time I would learn other things too: the university would bump up my aid just so; my mother back in India would rediscover her god; my own grief would mellow from one season to the next. As for D, among his many talents, he was a certified first responder, specially trained for run-ins with wildlife. That afternoon he came around the boulder yelling, “Hey bear! Hey bear!” His voice was so deep, so manly. He squinted at the animal in wonder. He gathered himself up, raised his arms above his head. He was full frontal, as was I. His abs glistened in their washboard glory, his pale groomed genitals were flecked with mud.
For a time the bear just stood there and stared. Then it was huffing, snorting, swatting the ground with its paws. Meanwhile D carried on in his baritone: “We have to act big! Project strength! Let him know who’s boss—” He interpreted the bear’s actions in real time. “It’s a juvenile male! Stressed! Threatened! Hungry, probably! Midsummer is peak scarcity in these parts! It’ll eat whatever I guess! Do you have anything aromatic in your bag? Sunscreen! Toothpaste! Lip balm—” Soon D began repeating himself. “Hey bear!” he kept yelling. A couple times I tried to join in, but my voice was a squeak—more harm than good. I stood there and just waved my arms.
D was running out of things to say, I feared, but then he remembered about his manifesto. He started in on the latest revision. Love was too simple; his new thing was respect. Respect the earth. Respect the oceans. Respect fossil fuels, mosquitoes, volcanoes, the Sun, D yelled, while I, who knew next to nothing about bears, noticed a slight shift. The bear would balk a little, flinch almost, every time D said respect. Something about the fricative? Again I attempted speech: “Respect space, respect distance, respect secrets, respect time.” And D kept going too. “Respect marsh gas, respect steak houses, respect video games, respect Republicans…”
Finally the bear lowered its gaze. In its infinite wisdom it picked up my backpack—jerky and all, but nothing so important—then lumbered off into the thickets, leaving us both to figure things out.