The Platen Knob Proposition

Subject: so about last night

Chris,

Okay so I'm writing this at my kitchen table with coffee I have already reheated twice, and I am going to tell you the whole thing in order because if I don't you will keep texting me "so???" like someone who has never once in his life let a story finish. Also I want it in writing that I was right about the floodlight. That comes later.

First, inventory. Here is what is currently on my nightstand: one platen knob from your dead typewriter, which you gave me and which I am keeping, that is settled, do not fight me on it. One fossilized rodent jaw in a little plastic bag that Elle at the lab will absolutely notice is missing, so enjoy that guilt. And one emergency radio, the hand-crank kind, that we forgot to grab when we left the annex at one in the morning like two irresponsible adults. The radio is still in there. Somebody from the fair committee is going to find it sitting on a crate next to a three-million-year-old glyptodont and they are going to have questions. I have decided that is your problem.

Also on the nightstand: half a protein bar and a sock. The sock is not part of the story. I just want the inventory to be honest.

* * *

So. The fair. The whole town was out on the plaza for the emergency preparedness thing, the one they do every year where the fire department sets up a tent and the museum sets up a table and some poor guy demonstrates the water purification tablets to school groups. I was working the museum table because that is my life now, I collect bat guano for the fossil prep lab, and yes I know how that sounds, and no I am not going to stop saying it because you are literally the only person on this planet who reacts to that sentence the correct way, which is with awe.

You showed up around six with your band's road case still in the car because their show got moved to Wednesday, and you had that floodlight with you, the big one from the last gig, the one with the cracked stand that you have been threatening to fix since approximately forever. And I had had, by that point, two cups of the fair's terrible chicha and zero patience, and I looked at you and said, "Do you want to see something that will ruin your whole week," and you said, "Desiree, it's nine at night," and then you picked up the floodlight anyway. So that's on you.

The thing about the annex is this. You remember it from two years ago, the half-collapsed building out past the plaza where the ashfall beds are, the wall of pumice and bone under the tin roof. The stratigraphy in there is stupid beautiful. Layers and layers of the volcano's bad mood, and pressed in the middle of it, bones. The town doesn't have the money to do it properly so it just sort of sits there with a padlock and a laminated sign, and a few of us from the lab poke at it on weekends. Two weeks ago I uncovered about a third of a glyptodont carapace. Do you know what a glyptodont is. It is a mammal the size of a small car wearing armor like a soccer ball. It is, objectively, the coolest thing in that building, and I found a third of its face, and I had been sitting on that news for two weeks waiting for somebody who would appreciate it, and that somebody is you, because everybody else says "neat" and changes the subject to their divorce.

So we climbed the fence, which I did gracefully and you did not, and we got inside, and I had keys, I want it noted that I had keys, we are not criminals, though we did climb the fence first, and you set up the floodlight on the cracked stand and pointed it at the wall and the whole bed lit up orange and I got to watch your face while you saw the carapace come out of the ash. You did the thing with your mouth. The open-mouth thing. You know the one.

And then, because you are you, you said, "Okay but wait, show me the scoop."

* * *

The guano scoop. God. Okay.

So part of my job, the glamorous part, the part that goes on my business cards in my imagination, is collecting bat guano from the caves near the lab, because the guano matrix preserves microfossils and pollen and all this stuff, and the tool we use for it is this long-handled scoop with a fine mesh screen, and it is honestly just a fancy dustpan, it is a forty-dollar dustpan with a telescoping handle, and I got it out of my bag because I had brought it to show the fair crowds, because the museum table is not exactly drowning in thrills.

And you held it up to the floodlight like it was Excalibur. You turned it over. You extended the telescoping handle with this little ratchet sound and you said, "Desiree. This is the sexiest tool on Earth," and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a crate, and then you extended it to full length and held it like a rifle and did an entire silent-bit routine about storming the beach, and I laughed harder, and you stepped back to take a bow and your heel caught the edge of a sample tray and knocked it over and scattered forty little labeled baggies of pumice fragments across the floor, and we both just stood there in the floodlight looking at the mess, and then you said, "Well. They're already labeled as disturbed context now," and I laughed until I had to put my hand on the wall.

We picked up the baggies on our hands and knees for ten minutes and it was honestly the best ten minutes of my month, which is sad, but there it is.

* * *

And then we ended up on the tarp. You remember the big blue plastic tarp they keep laid over the work area, and there is no furniture in there because furniture costs money, so after the baggie cleanup we just sort of lay down on it side by side, staring up at the ceiling, which is this sagging tin and, I am fairly sure, some original asbestos paneling from whenever the annex was built, and you, being you, could not lie under a questionable ceiling without lecturing, so you started explaining HEPA filters.

I want you to know I was listening. The whole thing, about how the pleats increase the surface area and how the fibers catch particles in three different ways, interception and impaction and diffusion, and how the diffusion one only really works on the smallest particles because they get knocked around by air molecules like drunk pedestrians, and I was genuinely interested, I was, and I also want you to know that at no point during the lecture did either of us acknowledge that we had met during a county emergency drill five years ago and hooked up exactly once, three years ago at the volcano festival, and had managed to be weird about it ever since. The asbestos lecture was our way of not being weird. It was working great.

And then your hand found the small of my back. Under my hoodie, just resting there, warm, and I did not move. I did