In his urgency to reach the office of Professor Sam Chambers on the top floor of the Anthropology building, located on the edge of Berkeley’s campus, Blake Meier abandoned his normally measured approach to life and haphazardly rolled his bike up into the general vicinity of the crowded bike rack at the foot of the stone steps. Aluminum clanking against steel, the bike tottered, and then clattered to the ground.
Normally this would have infuriated Blake—the carelessness, the awareness of other people shaking their heads as they walked by, the complete lack of respect for those who locked their bikes on campus with the implicit trust that their property would be safe and treated with respect. But he was halfway up the stone steps already, and it didn’t matter, not with this news in hand.
This would change everything. An opportunity like this landing in his lap a year shy of his PhD was…remarkable to say the least.
Blake made a beeline for the stairs. His long, lean legs swallowed the steps as he climbed. He was sweating through the plain white cotton t-shirt by the time he shoved open the door on the twelfth floor. He was tired, but not worn out. All the research trips he took to the mountains, beaches, and deserts around the state helped keep Blake in top shape. Truth be told, he might have been in the best shape of his life since he got to Berkeley. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a bare forearm.
Then he stopped.
The hiccupping, incoherent burble of a girl trying to speak while she was crying filtered through the door at the end of the hall. She was bleating like a lost lamb.
“Let’s just be honest with each other.” Professor Chambers’ voice reverberated into hall. “You spent more time on your outfit this morning than you did on this paper.”
The girl spoke between gasps. “No…I…worked on it for weeks. Professor. Please.”
Blake smirked, not without some remorse. He’d been at the other end of Chambers’ insults before. They hurt more when they were clever.
“You don’t see it yet,” Chambers went on, “but I’m doing you a favor. One day you’ll look back on this moment and thank me.”
Blake heard the sound of paper shuffling and then a young woman stumbled into the hall, a printout completely obfuscated with red pen marks clutched in one hand. Tears streamed down her cheeks. It was Catalina Hermosa, a fourth year anthropology undergrad. Blake smiled at her even though her smeared makeup made her look like a sad clown. She dabbed at her eyes with the backs of her hands as she stumbled out of the room. Catalina glanced up, saw Blake, and her freckled face flushed a deep red.
Blake had been her TA for a semester last year. She was a hard worker, a little slow on the uptake maybe. He wasn’t surprised to hear that Chambers didn’t like her essay; he was notoriously difficult to please. But she was definitely a hard worker.
Catalina pushed past him, scowling. Blake’s shoulder bumped into the wall.
He opened his mouth to ask her what he did to deserve that, then shrugged. He had wordlessly detached himself from her affections after the semester ended. He gave her an A, of course. Was that too obvious? Oh well. There were plenty of other women.
Ever since Blake had moved out to UC Berkeley to attend graduate school on grant money and scholarships, he’d found it rather easy to fall into bed with a woman—was amazed, even, how difficult getting laid had once seemed. Maybe it was the confidence with which he had swaggered into the little college town. He had been floating on the high of getting a full ride for his Anthropology PhD combined with the idea of a fresh start on the left coast. So maybe he smiled a little broader, or came off a little more self-assured. He didn’t care what the reason was. He felt like a new man here, and women could sense that; more importantly they liked it.
Since then, several years of graduate school had been good to him. He shed the rest of his baby fat in his second year and never put it back on. He credited his improved physique to the physical labor of archaeology digs and field trips—and a lot of time in the national forests and beaches in and around the bay area. His deeply sun-bronzed skin, his lean—almost gaunt—features, had changed him from the outside in.
Blake stepped into the doorway of Sam’s office and waited with a straight face for the rockstar archaeologist to deign to notice his presence. Born of an Indian mother and a white American father, the professor’s desk nameplate read “Dr. Samarjit Chambers.” He asked his friends to call him Sam. Sam had light brown skin, a strong, straight chin, and thick, dark curls. He was busy adjusting his hair in the reflection of one of his many framed degrees and awards, which hung on the wall behind his desk. When he realized Blake was watching him, he pretended to straighten the frame of the silver award he’d been using as a mirror and turned around.
“Blake! Didn’t I just say goodbye to you an hour ago?”
“Chief Eagle Eye Cherry invited me out to speak with him,” Blake said.
“You’re kidding. Really?”
That wasn’t the Navajo chief’s real name, but an inside joke between Blake and Sam that referenced the song Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry. It had been playing like a broken record on the radio for weeks. Blake and Sam both hated the pop song, preferring the wild guitar licks of Zeppelin and Black Sabbath to the newer music the radio stations continued to call rock and roll. The old chief, a broken record in his own right, had repeatedly refused Blake’s requests to explore the reservation land near the Uintah Basin—until now.
“What changed his mind?” Sam asked. He stared with unblinking eyes at Blake.
“The National Institute for Discovery Sciences made an offer on Skinwalker Ranch, and he’s pissed about it.”
Sam scoffed. “Seriously? The UFO people?”
“I think they’re interested in all paranormal activity.”
“Please.”
“Hey, I don’t care. Whatever gets us in the door. They can chase ghosts while we make the real discoveries, right?”
“When?”
Blake smirked.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Sam asked.
“Don’t you have office hours till five?”
“It’s a long drive to Utah.”
Seven years of maneuvering through the backstabbing bureaucracy of this PhD program, and his hustle had finally paid off. Blake had finally hit pay dirt. He imagined his name printed next to Sam’s in bold letters in Nature and Archaeology as they hurried out of the building to Sam’s car.
When Blake met other, mostly older, career archaeologists, he could make bets on their telling him at some point in the conversation, after they had marveled over his acquaintance with the charming Sam Chambers, that he had no reason to be in a hurry with his career. “You have so much life ahead of you,” they would say. “You have time. You’re still young.” They used every idiom to talk down to him about how the rewards would come with toil and patience.
Blake rolled his eyes at that whole pile of shit. He wasn’t blind. He saw the funding drying up, the cutthroat competition among grad students seeking the best doctoral advisors on campus. Blake had gotten the best. He’d worked hard for Sam’s attention, earned it inch by inch. And now…
Pay dirt.
It was all he could do to contain an animal howl of pleasure.
Blake lowered himself into the passenger side of Sam’s cherry-colored BMW 3 Series convertible. The tires squealed as Sam peeled out of the parking lot. Soon they merged onto I-80 heading north.
When they had cleared the city limits, Blake realized he had left his bike on the ground. He slapped his palm against his forehead in frustration. That kind of carelessness was so unlike him.
But at that point it didn’t matter. He could get another bike. He would never get another chance like this.
