He looks older, Jon thinks to himself. The baby fat has disappeared from Bastion’s face and his skin, it’s flimsier. Thin marionette string endings lift the edges of his expression into a half-hearted smile. Bastion always had the sort of ordinary face you’d likely forget if not for the fact of his departure, the way absence suddenly makes you memorable.
When he passed Bastion on the street earlier in the day, on his way to work, he didn’t even recognize him.
“Jon!” someone shouted as he fixed a slipping iPod earbud back into his ear.
He turned around and didn’t see anyone he thought might be calling his name.
“Jon, what’s up?” said a towering, disheveled figure with matted hair lugging an oversized backpack, pants sliding off of his hips and dusty, tattered boots with disappearing soles sinking into the pavement.
Even when he finally understood who it was, he still couldn’t seem to process that it was actually Bastion. Someone had plucked his friend from a moment years earlier, from the last time he saw him, and without a thought just dropped him back down, all worn and tan and sand-whipped, on the corner of 38th St. and Park Avenue at 9:15 in the morning.
“Say something.”
He stammered at first but then caught himself. “This is weird. Where the hell have you been?” The words were all wrong, and they came out sounding loud and angry instead of the good sort of surprised he had hoped for.
Bastion just shrugged, as if none of it really mattered anymore, as if everything between then and now could be pressed into a kernel of nonexistence. “Everywhere,” he finally said. “And yet,” he looked around him, acknowledged the people rushing off to work who likely wondered at this odd interaction between a lumbering traveler and Mr. business-casual, “it feels like I haven’t gone anywhere at all.”
“Later,” Jon promised, already turning to go, “meet me after work, at my apartment.” Jon wrote the address on a yellowed piece of triangular paper, the ripped off corner from some dog-eared page that Bastion handed him. “We’ll chat more.”
Jon turned to go and only realized, after having walked several blocks, that at no point had he bothered to look back.
“You look good,” Jon says now, deciding on pleasantries in place of the things he’s really thinking, those that he wants to say. “Skinnier though. You lost some weight.”
Bastion sits across from him in the living room, leaning back on the kitchen chair he has pulled alongside the wooden coffee table. The two glasses of water Jon has placed on the table for them sweat condensation while remaining untouched, expertly centered on coasters that get tossed down whenever guests arrive. Bastion pushes himself back and crosses his legs. Jon notices the boots still on his feet and has a momentary sense of annoyance that he hasn’t asked Bastion to take them off.
“From always moving around,” Bastion admits. “Plus the diet is always changing, not as many opportunities to eat meat. Pulls the bulk right out of your body.”
“So you went vegan?” There’s a joke the two of them have about this, from their college days, when the dining halls hosted a once-a-year vegan event that always brought in a troupe of emaciated adults wearing flare button pins reading things like “Vegan 4 Life, Vegan 4 Health.”
Bastion laughs. “No way,” he says. “Although I’ve come close to being forced into it on occasion.” He absent-mindedly puts his hand to his chin and feels out its contours. His fingers move over the stubble and there’s a hollow scratching sound, a raspy melody of sharp hairs.
Jon imagines that sound echoing in cavernous Patagonian chasms, attracting monstrous alien insects and cackling Bonobo monkeys in the thick of the Congo. In India, at an ashram, perhaps Bastion does it automatically, a response to the occasional landing fly, and it agitates some of the more amateur yogis who are there just on a temporary retreat, on holiday. They let themselves be wooed out of the meditation and, without realizing the anger this causes within them, scowl at Bastion in his place of Zen, all jaw and cheeks and thick lips hanging loosely, like the slow churning mouth of a sanctified cow caught in mid-chew.
Jon’s last comment, his attempt at a joke, an acknowledgement of their shared past, feels like the best he can do. He’s suddenly exhausted by his visitor. After all, it has been so long, so much has happened and changed. What do you say to someone who has been gone? Time is a monument to the absence, it stretches a shadow along the ground that pulls us into the dark, into a paralysis of quiet.
Bastion turns his head and lets his hand travel to the back of his neck, under the fabric of the beige linen shirt he’s wearing that opens up into a widened V-neck with missing laces. He scratches at a welted bug bite just below his hairline and Jon watches as the skin goes white from the pressure of the motion and then brightens into the red of irritation.
“All your pictures are old,” Bastion says, and Jon realizes that he has been looking around the room at the photos, some on the walls and others placed strategically on flat surfaces. “They’re all from back in the day.”
“Everything’s digital, so, you know, it’s all locked away in the computer somewhere. No one prints that stuff out.”
Bastion nods gravely, as if just having understood what it means that albums and frames and scrapbooks have become a thing of the past, and seeing for the first time how this translates into the imaged memories displayed in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
“That one though,” he points to a spot just over Jon’s right shoulder, “it’s funny. You remember when we took it?”
Jon glances at the photo Bastion has indicated. It’s the two of them together with a third friend, Mark, who Jon only rarely sees these days, thanks to busy schedules and relationships, professions that no one remembers how they got into and circumstances that start off innocently enough but then turn themselves into commitments and responsibilities, so that things get to the point where people don’t even think to ask why they only rarely see each other. In the photo the three of them stand at a distance from the photo-taker, soldier stiff on a patch of grass, dressed in tank tops and swimming trunks. They’re looking at the stranger holding the camera, purposely forcing stoic, disinterested expressions onto their faces, nothing more than a boyish attempt to look displeased, throw gravity into an otherwise carefree moment from their history. Despite this, they can’t help but squint in response to the sun breaking through the palm trees around them, the draping leaves cast shadows that obscure their faces and make the lighting particularly unsuited for documentation. Just behind them is a small pale stoned sculpture that displays the time and date and the words “Miami Beach, Florida.”
“Of course I remember,” Jon says, he turns his attention back to Bastion who keeps looking at the photo. “Summer after freshman year.”
“How has Mark been?”
“To tell you the truth I don’t really know. He was good the last time we spoke a few months ago.”
“I should probably give him a call while I’m in town.”
“Definitely,” agrees Jon, “I think he’d be excited to hear from you.” He says it even though in his heart he knows that Bastion probably won’t call Mark, just as Bastion probably wouldn’t have called him. It seems they’ve gotten past that point, past the place where it makes sense to call when you’re back in town.
“Crazy,” continues Bastion. “I think that was the first time I ever left home on a real trip. Nineteen years old and I’d never traveled farther than New Jersey.”
“What was in New Jersey?” Jon asks.
“My grandmother lived there.”
“She’s not there anymore?” Jon has forgotten about Bastion’s grandmother living in New Jersey.
Bastion shakes his head. “She passed away a couple of years back.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He sighs thoughtfully. “It happens you know.”
“How did you find out?”
“My mom told me. I only read the email from her a while after it happened. I was in Africa.”
Africa. Bastion says it in an easy way, the way most people would say “Brooklyn” or “baseball.” Jon has never been to Africa and he wonders what it must be like. All sorts of different places in Africa, of course, but the entire continent, even if he thinks about it as just one country, one vast land to get to and plant a foot on, seems terrifyingly out of reach to him. He will likely never see the sorts of things Bastion has seen, and he doesn’t know whether to feel sad or relieved about this.
Bastion who left everything suddenly, without warning, years ago. But how many years has it been? Bastion who, during the first few months after graduating college, when he was shopping around for jobs, trying to figure out the next steps like all of us do, decided to take a little break from the job market and travel for a week.
“Where are you going to go?” Jon asked him at the time.
“I’m not totally sure. I land in Panama City, but then I didn’t really chart it out past that point.”
“So you’re just randomly flying off to Panama City with no real plan?” Jon was incredulous. It seemed like the total opposite of something Bastion would do, even if it was for only a week.
“Pretty much.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Bastion repeated, his voice sounding annoyed. “I just want to. Do I need a specific reason?”
“I mean why Panama City, of all places, and why all of a sudden? Is everything OK?”
But Bastion didn’t answer. He just looked at Jon in this semi-mocking way and smiled. It was the sort of expression that said, “you don’t get it.”
Maybe there wasn’t anything to get, no psychological analysis to do. Maybe we have a tendency to look for the reason for something even when, often, there isn’t any.
Bastion left the next day, to very little fanfare, sort of like he just slipped out of the room during a party. Everyone milling around and drinking, laughing in response to comments and conversations they wouldn’t even remember the next day. And then eventually, at the point when people started to get tired of talking about themselves, someone just looked around casually for a moment, and asked, “did anyone see where Bastion went?”
It was a bit of a surprise when that one week became a month and then two months and three. But it became progressively less exciting to hear about Bastion’s new plans, since they were always changing. Slowly, everyone just got used to Bastion not being there, and his own gauging of time disappeared altogether, transitioned into a measurement of where he had and had not been. There was always another country to see, a whole region to visit. A continent, a world still unexplored.
For the first bit of time Bastion made an effort to stay in touch. He stopped off at Internet cafes to send messages. Sometimes he would randomly call and Jon heard his voice coming through as disorganized static electricity, an entity dialing from another dimension. Jon dreaded those calls because of how difficult they were to decipher, the chops and cuts in the conversation sounding like some new-age Morse Code.
“Market…that…today…but then I…she…drop.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
It was at some point during Bastion’s time in Chile, perhaps as he transitioned out of cities and busier towns into villages and hikes and extended trips through mountain passes, that Bastion began to disappear. The emails stopped coming as regularly as they had, the calls ceased completely. Then relatively soon thereafter, there was nothing at all. The way it happened was rather natural, a comfortable sort of receding into the quiet of sleep, at first just drooping lids and yawns, until it took over all at once, and the eyes clamped shut, the breathing shallowed, the mind regressed back through a tunnel and found itself apart from everything else. Bastion had slipped into the place of dreams.
Jon sees it now with Bastion sitting across from him in the living room. Bastion’s slimmed body and his head, which seems too large, bobbing around at the top of his neck, a neck that climbs out of the linen shirt like a sprouting vine. The expression on Bastion’s face, it’s curious, searching, the reflection of light from the outside shines in his eyes. Jon has the impression that Bastion is translucent, that he can see straight through him to the front door of the apartment.
“You going to stick around a while?” asks Jon, as he finally reaches down to take a sip of water from his glass. It’s cold and biting, it drives a little wedge of chill down the undersides of his arms.
Bastion glances at his own but doesn’t touch it. He smiles in that same way he smiled before he left for the first time.
When he passed Bastion on the street earlier in the day, on his way to work, he didn’t even recognize him.
“Jon!” someone shouted as he fixed a slipping iPod earbud back into his ear.
He turned around and didn’t see anyone he thought might be calling his name.
“Jon, what’s up?” said a towering, disheveled figure with matted hair lugging an oversized backpack, pants sliding off of his hips and dusty, tattered boots with disappearing soles sinking into the pavement.
Even when he finally understood who it was, he still couldn’t seem to process that it was actually Bastion. Someone had plucked his friend from a moment years earlier, from the last time he saw him, and without a thought just dropped him back down, all worn and tan and sand-whipped, on the corner of 38th St. and Park Avenue at 9:15 in the morning.
“Say something.”
He stammered at first but then caught himself. “This is weird. Where the hell have you been?” The words were all wrong, and they came out sounding loud and angry instead of the good sort of surprised he had hoped for.
Bastion just shrugged, as if none of it really mattered anymore, as if everything between then and now could be pressed into a kernel of nonexistence. “Everywhere,” he finally said. “And yet,” he looked around him, acknowledged the people rushing off to work who likely wondered at this odd interaction between a lumbering traveler and Mr. business-casual, “it feels like I haven’t gone anywhere at all.”
“Later,” Jon promised, already turning to go, “meet me after work, at my apartment.” Jon wrote the address on a yellowed piece of triangular paper, the ripped off corner from some dog-eared page that Bastion handed him. “We’ll chat more.”
Jon turned to go and only realized, after having walked several blocks, that at no point had he bothered to look back.
“You look good,” Jon says now, deciding on pleasantries in place of the things he’s really thinking, those that he wants to say. “Skinnier though. You lost some weight.”
Bastion sits across from him in the living room, leaning back on the kitchen chair he has pulled alongside the wooden coffee table. The two glasses of water Jon has placed on the table for them sweat condensation while remaining untouched, expertly centered on coasters that get tossed down whenever guests arrive. Bastion pushes himself back and crosses his legs. Jon notices the boots still on his feet and has a momentary sense of annoyance that he hasn’t asked Bastion to take them off.
“From always moving around,” Bastion admits. “Plus the diet is always changing, not as many opportunities to eat meat. Pulls the bulk right out of your body.”
“So you went vegan?” There’s a joke the two of them have about this, from their college days, when the dining halls hosted a once-a-year vegan event that always brought in a troupe of emaciated adults wearing flare button pins reading things like “Vegan 4 Life, Vegan 4 Health.”
Bastion laughs. “No way,” he says. “Although I’ve come close to being forced into it on occasion.” He absent-mindedly puts his hand to his chin and feels out its contours. His fingers move over the stubble and there’s a hollow scratching sound, a raspy melody of sharp hairs.
Jon imagines that sound echoing in cavernous Patagonian chasms, attracting monstrous alien insects and cackling Bonobo monkeys in the thick of the Congo. In India, at an ashram, perhaps Bastion does it automatically, a response to the occasional landing fly, and it agitates some of the more amateur yogis who are there just on a temporary retreat, on holiday. They let themselves be wooed out of the meditation and, without realizing the anger this causes within them, scowl at Bastion in his place of Zen, all jaw and cheeks and thick lips hanging loosely, like the slow churning mouth of a sanctified cow caught in mid-chew.
Jon’s last comment, his attempt at a joke, an acknowledgement of their shared past, feels like the best he can do. He’s suddenly exhausted by his visitor. After all, it has been so long, so much has happened and changed. What do you say to someone who has been gone? Time is a monument to the absence, it stretches a shadow along the ground that pulls us into the dark, into a paralysis of quiet.
Bastion turns his head and lets his hand travel to the back of his neck, under the fabric of the beige linen shirt he’s wearing that opens up into a widened V-neck with missing laces. He scratches at a welted bug bite just below his hairline and Jon watches as the skin goes white from the pressure of the motion and then brightens into the red of irritation.
“All your pictures are old,” Bastion says, and Jon realizes that he has been looking around the room at the photos, some on the walls and others placed strategically on flat surfaces. “They’re all from back in the day.”
“Everything’s digital, so, you know, it’s all locked away in the computer somewhere. No one prints that stuff out.”
Bastion nods gravely, as if just having understood what it means that albums and frames and scrapbooks have become a thing of the past, and seeing for the first time how this translates into the imaged memories displayed in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
“That one though,” he points to a spot just over Jon’s right shoulder, “it’s funny. You remember when we took it?”
Jon glances at the photo Bastion has indicated. It’s the two of them together with a third friend, Mark, who Jon only rarely sees these days, thanks to busy schedules and relationships, professions that no one remembers how they got into and circumstances that start off innocently enough but then turn themselves into commitments and responsibilities, so that things get to the point where people don’t even think to ask why they only rarely see each other. In the photo the three of them stand at a distance from the photo-taker, soldier stiff on a patch of grass, dressed in tank tops and swimming trunks. They’re looking at the stranger holding the camera, purposely forcing stoic, disinterested expressions onto their faces, nothing more than a boyish attempt to look displeased, throw gravity into an otherwise carefree moment from their history. Despite this, they can’t help but squint in response to the sun breaking through the palm trees around them, the draping leaves cast shadows that obscure their faces and make the lighting particularly unsuited for documentation. Just behind them is a small pale stoned sculpture that displays the time and date and the words “Miami Beach, Florida.”
“Of course I remember,” Jon says, he turns his attention back to Bastion who keeps looking at the photo. “Summer after freshman year.”
“How has Mark been?”
“To tell you the truth I don’t really know. He was good the last time we spoke a few months ago.”
“I should probably give him a call while I’m in town.”
“Definitely,” agrees Jon, “I think he’d be excited to hear from you.” He says it even though in his heart he knows that Bastion probably won’t call Mark, just as Bastion probably wouldn’t have called him. It seems they’ve gotten past that point, past the place where it makes sense to call when you’re back in town.
“Crazy,” continues Bastion. “I think that was the first time I ever left home on a real trip. Nineteen years old and I’d never traveled farther than New Jersey.”
“What was in New Jersey?” Jon asks.
“My grandmother lived there.”
“She’s not there anymore?” Jon has forgotten about Bastion’s grandmother living in New Jersey.
Bastion shakes his head. “She passed away a couple of years back.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He sighs thoughtfully. “It happens you know.”
“How did you find out?”
“My mom told me. I only read the email from her a while after it happened. I was in Africa.”
Africa. Bastion says it in an easy way, the way most people would say “Brooklyn” or “baseball.” Jon has never been to Africa and he wonders what it must be like. All sorts of different places in Africa, of course, but the entire continent, even if he thinks about it as just one country, one vast land to get to and plant a foot on, seems terrifyingly out of reach to him. He will likely never see the sorts of things Bastion has seen, and he doesn’t know whether to feel sad or relieved about this.
Bastion who left everything suddenly, without warning, years ago. But how many years has it been? Bastion who, during the first few months after graduating college, when he was shopping around for jobs, trying to figure out the next steps like all of us do, decided to take a little break from the job market and travel for a week.
“Where are you going to go?” Jon asked him at the time.
“I’m not totally sure. I land in Panama City, but then I didn’t really chart it out past that point.”
“So you’re just randomly flying off to Panama City with no real plan?” Jon was incredulous. It seemed like the total opposite of something Bastion would do, even if it was for only a week.
“Pretty much.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Bastion repeated, his voice sounding annoyed. “I just want to. Do I need a specific reason?”
“I mean why Panama City, of all places, and why all of a sudden? Is everything OK?”
But Bastion didn’t answer. He just looked at Jon in this semi-mocking way and smiled. It was the sort of expression that said, “you don’t get it.”
Maybe there wasn’t anything to get, no psychological analysis to do. Maybe we have a tendency to look for the reason for something even when, often, there isn’t any.
Bastion left the next day, to very little fanfare, sort of like he just slipped out of the room during a party. Everyone milling around and drinking, laughing in response to comments and conversations they wouldn’t even remember the next day. And then eventually, at the point when people started to get tired of talking about themselves, someone just looked around casually for a moment, and asked, “did anyone see where Bastion went?”
It was a bit of a surprise when that one week became a month and then two months and three. But it became progressively less exciting to hear about Bastion’s new plans, since they were always changing. Slowly, everyone just got used to Bastion not being there, and his own gauging of time disappeared altogether, transitioned into a measurement of where he had and had not been. There was always another country to see, a whole region to visit. A continent, a world still unexplored.
For the first bit of time Bastion made an effort to stay in touch. He stopped off at Internet cafes to send messages. Sometimes he would randomly call and Jon heard his voice coming through as disorganized static electricity, an entity dialing from another dimension. Jon dreaded those calls because of how difficult they were to decipher, the chops and cuts in the conversation sounding like some new-age Morse Code.
“Market…that…today…but then I…she…drop.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
It was at some point during Bastion’s time in Chile, perhaps as he transitioned out of cities and busier towns into villages and hikes and extended trips through mountain passes, that Bastion began to disappear. The emails stopped coming as regularly as they had, the calls ceased completely. Then relatively soon thereafter, there was nothing at all. The way it happened was rather natural, a comfortable sort of receding into the quiet of sleep, at first just drooping lids and yawns, until it took over all at once, and the eyes clamped shut, the breathing shallowed, the mind regressed back through a tunnel and found itself apart from everything else. Bastion had slipped into the place of dreams.
Jon sees it now with Bastion sitting across from him in the living room. Bastion’s slimmed body and his head, which seems too large, bobbing around at the top of his neck, a neck that climbs out of the linen shirt like a sprouting vine. The expression on Bastion’s face, it’s curious, searching, the reflection of light from the outside shines in his eyes. Jon has the impression that Bastion is translucent, that he can see straight through him to the front door of the apartment.
“You going to stick around a while?” asks Jon, as he finally reaches down to take a sip of water from his glass. It’s cold and biting, it drives a little wedge of chill down the undersides of his arms.
Bastion glances at his own but doesn’t touch it. He smiles in that same way he smiled before he left for the first time.
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