The article is behind a paywall, but Graham can see the photo. It’s him, stretched out on his rock, gloriously frothy. Only she could make his thallus glisten like that, only she could make him enlarge even in drought.
That spring, her strawberry blonde hair whipped around her face and a gold necklace dangled from the open neck of her work shirt. She distracted him from the pinch of her tweezers by telling him about the study of cryptobiotics.
“Like Sasquatch?”
“No, silly,” she said. Her laugh stirred the air over his ostioles. She smelled like heavy-duty SPF and powder-fresh Secret. “Crypto, like hidden. Bio, like the earth.”
“Nothing hidden about me.” He wasn’t used to the copper strength of his voice. The shyest of lichen, perpetually unnoticed, straddling a boulder in a desert one hundred thousand miles square, and she made him loud. It wasn’t until she left with her samples that Graham realized he was flirting, and it wasn’t until she sent him an email about his CO2 uptake which he was pretty sure he’d already answered, that he realized she was flirting, too.
By noon, friends he hasn’t heard from in years—a moss who used to live along the coyote path, a lacewing from the old bowling league—are blowing up his phone with congratulations. Even his brother reaches out to tell him he’s proud. (His parents don’t bother. They wouldn’t know proud if it slapped them in the face.)
Graham replies with gratitude, but the message he wants is hers. A hey how are you, it’s been too long. A single winky-face emoji. She could spare a couple of words, however microscopic.
The sun shoulders off clouds and tilts red onto the rocks. The sky turns graphite black. A kangaroo rat hops across his length, digging around in him for seeds.
He doesn’t feel the chill or the pain.
He pictures her in a bar in Phoenix. A colleague pours her a beer from a slopping pitcher. The man invents reasons to touch her, to finger the pendant on her necklace, to brush a stray strand of hair from her cheek.
Graham contracts. He retreats into the hidden core of himself that must know the worst of it. He coughs up $29.99 for online access and finds the whole article, unsexily titled “Changes in CO2 Diffusion in Certain Desert Lichen.”
He squeezes back tears at this reduction of himself to a nameless sample. Anonymous, forgettable, one out of a billion. He reads on, stuttering through the scientific jargon and over tables of figures, desperate for a conclusion that will admit that the changes in him had nothing to do with carbon dioxide and everything to do with her pink nose under a wide-brimmed hat and the pieces of him she plucked and carried off on a microscope slide, pieces of him she will never give back.
