Chapter 4
Hayden might live in LA, but he lives downtown .
With how large LA is, downtown might as well be in a different state. It reminds me of being back home in New York, minus the quaint bodegas and endless good food at every corner. Instead, there are so many unidentifiable office buildings, apartments meant to look like lavish Italian villas overlooking the cluttered LA freeways, and the full gauntlet of niche restaurants and bars.
I round the corner and park in Hayden’s guest lot. His building is straight out of a history book on Art Deco architecture. A decorative marquee hangs in front of the entryway—which has a doorman— and gold-plated revolving doors. It looks more like a high-end hotel than an apartment building. Hell, it beats the two-story stucco monstrosity of my apartment building. The inside is industrial-chic, with exposed brick and aesthetically placed pipes. There are flatscreens on the walls, playing what looks like artistic sensory videos for babies. I watch them, mesmerized, as I wait for an elevator up to the twelfth floor.
I follow the hall to the corner apartment, hesitating before knocking. It’s real now. We have work to do and both of our careers hinge on it. Well, at least if all else fails, Hayden can go back to podcasting. Judging by the type of apartment he lives in, he’s doing fine talking about cryptids and monsters.
Me, though…I’ll be out of a job. I’ll have proved Cade right. I don’t matter. I wasn’t special enough on my own.
I finally knock, and the door swings open. Today, Hayden’s wearing a heather-gray T-shirt with “West Virginia State Cryptozoology Department” and who I think is Mothdude on it. After a bit of Googling, I can now successfully identify several notable cryptids. Bigfoot’s easy, so is the Loch Ness Monster. I’m still working on the rest.
The T-shirt shows that the odd deer tattoo on his forearm is hardly the end of the artwork. Ink extends up to a massive piece on his upper arm. There are waves, a ship, and…tentacles? They wrap around his bicep and shoulder, where other tiny shop minimum–type tattoos paint the inside of his bicep down to his forearm.
Fiddlesticks.
He has nice biceps.
“Hey, come on in,” Hayden invites. I step inside and slip my jacket off. He quickly takes it and hangs it on an honest-to-god coatrack. I don’t even have a coatrack.
I’m expecting Hayden’s apartment to be much like the other twenty-something guy apartments I’ve been in—messy, disorganized, with sad attempts at furniture and décor—but it’s not. Hayden’s apartment is so bright . Huge windows line the back wall. My eyes leap from rooftop bar to rooftop pool to glowing billboards. It looks like an old warehouse, gutted and retrofitted into a trendy loft. The open-concept living room and kitchen have exposed brick walls and more industrial beams and pipes.
He also knows how to decorate. The walls are decked with expensive-looking art, there’s a basket of decorative balls and scented pinecones on the coffee table, and an extensive built-in bookcase along the back wall near the flatscreen. Who the hell is this man?
He smells good, dresses well, and looks like he moisturizes.
I bet he even has a bed frame.
“You found it okay?”
“Yeah.” I take in the scent of warm cinnamon and leather-bound books. “I don’t come downtown often, but this is nice.”
“It’s home.”
“And you afford this just from your podcast?”
It’s complete word vomit, but the benefit of LA is that it’s not actually uncouth to ask about people’s rent. It’s always high, and we are always sad about it.
“My dad owned the unit, but it’s mine now. So, kind of, but not really.”
“Right…” I trail off. Hayden shoves his hands in his pockets and we linger in silence. If we are going to work together, we have to be friendly. We have to trust one another. He needs to believe I’m guiding him on the best path, and I have to believe the content he’s creating will make us both money. I’ve learned by now to never count on the nice guys. Friendly could be nothing more than an outfit.
Something about Hayden feels different, though. I debated meeting him somewhere public to keep a boundary in place, but when he mentioned he had a recording studio built in his apartment, it was hard to argue he wasn’t well equipped. Yet I still feel anxiety roiling in my stomach at the idea of being alone with him. I fear the awkward small talk, the uncomfortable feeling of a first playdate with a new friend, and the tingling feeling he leaves in my chest. Even his emails and phone calls make my heart race in a way that scares me. It scares me most because I can’t control it.
The last time I was in a man’s apartment was the night I left Cade, and that didn’t go well.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“Just water is fine,” I say.
He pours a glass of water from the Brita filter and passes me the cup. The side of the glass reads “Property of Area 51.” I note the items stuck on his fridge—a newspaper clipping about a strange creature sighting, an alien-shaped bottle opener, and a sticky note with a number that reads “Dark Web Guy.” As I take a sip, something hairy rubs against my leg. I jump back with a yelp and glance down. A well-fed gray cat gawks up at me with huge yellow pupils and meows, but it sounds more like a rabid raccoon in a garbage disposal.
“Hi,” I appease the cat.
“That’s Cthulhu.”
At the sound of his name, Cthulhu flops over, and I’m concerned he won’t be able to get back up. If so, do I flip him over again? Do I have to pick him up? I like cats in theory, but in practice, I end up with scratches everywhere . I squat beside the cat and give his tummy a rub. He simply accepts my gesture.
“Well, he doesn’t behave like a Lovecraftian monster.”
“No.” Hayden laughs. “His sea monster days are long gone now. Right, buddy?”
Cthulhu successfully flips over and waddles in Hayden’s direction, brushing himself against Hayden’s jeans and leaping onto a short cat tree. I don’t think he’d be able to jump much higher.
“So,” Hayden transitions, tossing the cat a treat, “before we get started, I think it might be a good idea to run you through some basics.”
“Basics?”
He nods, moving into the living room. I follow, plopping myself on his smooth leather couch. Instead of sitting with me, he turns on the flatscreen and stands in front of it. Then I notice the clicker in his hands.
Oh no .
Nothing good comes of a man with a clicker.
The stiff, nervous guy who invited me in slides off like a jacket as he rubs his hands together.
“If we’re going to make a show together, you should be on my level. See, I can make a deck, too.” He winks. Does this man’s personality only turn on when he’s talking about cryptids?
“Nothing could ever put me on your level, Hayden.”
“I encourage you to take notes.” Hayden raises a small notepad and a pen beside his head, but I respond by reaching into my bag and taking out my own. I came prepared and he is delighted.
The TV lights up with a blank slide. Hayden hits a button on his remote, and a title pops up.
Suddenly, his dorky monster T-shirt fits him like a well-worn uniform and he’s the guy I saw on TV a few days ago. Eager, passionate, and ready to spew some weird shit. This is like the world’s strangest college lecture.
CRYPTIDS I didn’t write this myself.”
“Oh good,” I mutter. “I was worried.”
Yet, even as I dismiss Hayden, I’m amazed at the confidence he has when he gets on these topics. Even if he didn’t write the definition himself, he knows it well enough to recite it from memory. I’m alarmingly turned on by this man, waving emphatically with a clicker in hand in front of a drawing of the Vitruvian man with an alien head.
I unbutton the top of my flannel.
“Moving on—some of the most popular cryptids include Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, El Chupacabra, the Yeti, and the Jersey Devil. Cryptids come from all over the world, and all cultures have their own mysterious creatures.”
Even though he sounds batshit peculiar, I do like listening to Hayden talk. His voice is soothing and I enjoy watching the way his arms flex as he waves them around, pointing to different figures on the slides. He does whip out a laser pointer. He swirls the light around a horrific drawing of the Jersey Devil onscreen.
“See, hooves. ” He circles them with the laser pointer. “Horse head , wings , antlers. So, clearly, this is not your average horse.”
Then Cthulhu waddles into the room before being informed the laser pointer is not for him.
Several slides later, I raise my hand.
“Uh…yes?”
“Which one is your favorite?”
Hayden frowns. His arms cross in front of his chest, and I wish he wouldn’t do things like that. Or that he’d at least put on a jacket or long sleeves or something . “Really?”
“I want to know.”
“Genuinely?”
I nod.
He scratches the back of his neck, like he hadn’t been expecting my genuine interest. “I dunno, probably Bigfoot?”
“Boring.”
He breaks into an even larger frown. “Yeah, says the girl who doesn’t even think he’s real! Look, would you fault someone who said their favorite superhero was Superman? They’re iconic for a reason, duh. Any other questions?”
“So many…”
I spend the next hour learning everything from the origins of cryptozoology to whatever the fuck a Flatwoods Monster is before we transition.
“The other half of this podcast is conspiracy theories. I lump cryptozoology in with conspiracies because I personally think there’s a bit of overlap. Like, for example, there are theories that Mothman came from a World War II munitions plant, but that’s just a theory.” He clicks to the next slide, featuring a Venn diagram with examples that feel like a foreign language, and laces his fingers together. “See? Overlap.”
I am taking notes, but Hayden promises a printout of his deck to keep on hand as we work on episodes. I promise him I’ll sleep with it under my pillow, but he doesn’t find this amusing.
“So, when you talk conspiracy theories, you’re talking like JFK assassination, Area 51, the fake moon landing…”
He nods, running his fingers through his hair. He’s worked himself up at some point discussing the differences between types of Sasquatches, and he now has a faint sheen of sweat along his hairline. “Exactly. There are a lot of conspiracy theories that are steeped in racism and anti-Semitism, so I avoid those because they don’t need airtime and I don’t want to validate them. Unless I feel particularly vocal and want to disprove certain theories and point out why they suck.”
“We love that,” I say. “Woke conspiracy theorist.”
I follow him through the rest of his slideshow, where he breaks down common conspiracies and the theories behind them. Through the duration of his presentation, I ponder if the man missed his calling as a cool, hot high school teacher. I ask for a refill of water when he begins to explain that we on Earth do not have the technological capabilities to mutilate cattle in the way aliens do. It’s complete with vigorous hand motions that make it look like he’s slaughtering a cow in his living room.
“Did you retain all of that?” Hayden asks.
“I think so. Now, where to begin?”
Finally, he joins me on the couch, his own notepad in hand. “So, some of my most popular podcast episodes were the four-part series I did on Area 51, the JFK assassination, and my episodes on Mothman. I did a two-part special on the National Treasure movies.”
“Fuck, I love National Treasure .”
“You mean the movie about a conspiracy ,” he jests, eyebrows raising over his glasses, “about the Founding Fathers?”
“It is a national treasure, and a fictional kids’ movie starring Nicolas Cage. Moving on. If I were entirely new to this—”
“—which you are—”
“—where would you advise I begin?”
His eyes widen like I’ve asked him to teach me to reverse engineer a UFO or something. “Honestly, I might start with something basic—cases of alien abductions, the Roswell crash—or keep it classic and go with Bigfoot.”
“Let’s start with Roswell. I think there’s some potential there. It’s still grounded, but definitely out there. I think enough people know about it that it’s attention grabbing.”
“I mean, yeah .” His eyes widen. “What’s more attention grabbing than alien corpses?”
Perhaps I am wrong about Roswell being easy to digest. “Wow, you got me there.”
“All right, let me pull up the episode.”
We huddle around Hayden’s computer as he plays the episode. Both of us sit on the couch with notebooks in hand, taking notes throughout. As with all his episodes, Hayden knows how to tell a story. He doesn’t come across like a raving zealot on YouTube. He makes a conspiracy about a damn weather balloon compelling.
By the end of the episode, I have a vision. He’ll give an abbreviated lesson—infographics, narration, images. We can shape it like a monster-of-the-week TV episode, full of his quips and jokes. Since it’s our first episode and we’re getting our feet wet, we’ll use the Skroll studios. When we have the go-ahead for the season and a more concrete budget, we can eventually go on ghost hunts and monster hunts and take inspiration from the existing episodes and work our footage into it.
“We’d need to find the clip of Obama saying that the classified UFO stuff isn’t really that interesting—because, you know, that’s what he has to say, right?”
I roll my eyes. “What if it’s not actually that interesting?”
Hayden slides onto the floor, resting his notebook on the coffee table and reading a book from the shelf. He doesn’t look up to argue with me this time. “Sometimes the truth is the real story. It’s all a matter of what you believe. Some people trust what they’re told, some of us don’t.”
“Right,” I say. Cade’s face flashes in my mind and his insidious words echo in my brain. “And you’re trusting your show with a known nonbeliever.”
He shrugs, an obvious smile threatening to break out. “If we’re both here, you obviously believe in something.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Well, why not?”
I think on his question. Hayden knows more about cryptids and conspiracies than even the deepest Wikipedia rabbit holes, but when he glances across the table, I feel warm inside, and when I realize he is genuinely asking for my opinion, my throat suddenly feels dry.
“I guess…I guess I don’t want to fall for everything people tell me.”
“It’s not about falling for it,” he corrects, with no condescension in his voice. “No one tricked me into believing in this stuff. There’s no grand master plan with malicious intent in believing in Bigfoot. At least, I don’t think so. There could be, but I’d have to do more research.”
I leave Hayden vexed as he thinks all of this over.
“You mean Bigfoot is not running a phishing scam?”
He shakes his head with conviction. “I doubt it.”
“How did you get into this stuff? It’s a very… niche interest.”
Instead of a snarky response, Hayden quiets, tapping his pen against his pad. His Adam’s apple bobs as he looks away, back down at the Roswell book. Has he been abducted by aliens or had a traumatic run-in with Bigfoot?
He clears his throat. “My dad. Weird stuff was his thing.”
Was. The past tense is not lost on me, nor was it lost on me when he said the apartment used to belong to his father. I can gather enough from that and the way Hayden clicks his pen repeatedly to fill the silence. The question is Out There, but I doubt I’ll get an answer anytime soon.
“So…” Hayden’s eyes skim the page in front of him, then life floods back into his eyes. He waves his pen in circles to pivot me back to Roswell. “There’s this thing called the Ramey Memo we should talk about…”