bryan

It’s early, only around 8:30 in the morning, so I’m impressed with Bryan, whom I’m picking up at the gym. I’m expecting a young guy, bouncing, fit and full of confidence and Red Bull.

In the parking lot behind the gym, I see a small skeleton holding a phone. It is no more than five feet tall. Its stick legs poke out from long cut-off sweat pants and disappear into untied high-top basketball sneakers, worn without socks. A thin and worn-looking white tee shirt accentuates its ribs, making it appear barrel-chested. And atop the scruffy, unshaven skull sits a navy blue beanie with the letters “FBI” emblazoned on the front.

Closing my eyes, I roll down my window, smell the warming, early spring sunlight, and sit back to wait for Bryan to emerge.

A moment later, I’m startled by the sound of the car door. The tiny skeleton leans in.

“Uber for Bryan?”

“Oh! Right! Yes! Um, are you Bryan?”

“That’s right.” Bryan slides his backpack across the back seat and gets in the car. I roll up my window.

“I didn’t realize that was you, Bryan. I’m sorry. I’m Santiago. Looks like you’re getting an early work out in today! Good for you!”

“Yup. Wanted to lift weights before work.” His voice is incongruously confident. But I’m still skeptical, trying to imagine what weight he could lift when he appears almost weightless. 

“By the way, do you mind if we make a quick stop at the Dunkin’ across the street so I can pick up a coffee? I already ordered it.”

“Sure, Bryan, no problem.”

When we pull into Dunkin’, a crew of burly construction workers wearing day-glow safety vests and hard hats congregate in the lobby. They so fill the space that I can’t see past them to the counter. I’m apprehensive for Bryan, who heaves the door open and clatters into the shop. I imagine a confrontation that ends with him snapped into pieces and tossed like a pile of kindling on the floor of Dunkin’.

As Bryan steps toward the wall of workers, hard-hatted heads look around as if searching for the source of some signal, then look down. Miraculously, the wall parts. Bryan approaches the counter, grabs his coffee, turns around, and, with a slight nod, exits through the aisle the big bodies have now opened for him: their tiny, skeletal Jedi king. 

Back in the car, when I ask him if he’s working out for anything in particular, he tells me he runs ultra-marathons. 

“Oh! Wow! I’ve got a friend who does those. How’d you get into that?” 

“That’s a long story, Santiago. You sure you want to hear it?”

“Absolutely! As long as you can tell it in”—I check our ETA on my phone—thirteen minutes.” Bryan laughs. 

“In 2001,” he begins, “I had just begun my first year at Springfield College. I was planning on studying physical therapy. But I was a mediocre student. No motivation. Then 9-11 happened, and I enlisted in the Air Force.” I want to know more about the time hidden between the beginning of that last sentence and the end of it, but Bryan is already moving on.

“So in the spring of the next year, I got sent to Afghanistan as a sniper. But…” —and here Bryan laughs, as though surprised by a joke—“…I got sniped instead! Took a bullet to the back of my neck and one to my spine. Next thing I know, I was in a hospital in Kabul, couldn’t feel anything from my face down.”

“Jesus, Bryan! That sounds terrifying!” Bryan’s story so absorbs me in its brief staccato intensity that I momentarily forget that it will end with him running ultra-marathons and telling me about all this in the car. It’s like when you’re watching the part of a romantic comedy where the couple splits temporarily, and you forget that you know they’ll end up together. I’ve forgotten the genre I’m in.

“They flew me back to the States, and I spent six months at Walter Reed. I couldn’t move. I had to be fed; I pissed through a tube into a bag, I wore diapers—fuckin’ diapers, and I had to have my ass wiped. And the doctors said I had a 20 percent chance of ever walking again. When I heard that, I thought, well, I ain’t living like this, so I’m either going to walk, or I’m going to kill myself.

“It began with just passive physical therapy while I was lying in the bed, where they’d massage me and move my legs and arms. Then it was me moving my toes, trying to contract muscles. A big break happened when I got feeling and movement back in my upper body. I was weak, but with the help of my arms, over time, I could support myself on parallel bars and use my core to swing my legs like I was walking. Next was putting weight on them. After some time I could walk the halls with a walker.

“So then I thought maybe I could run with this thing. So I started sort of shuffling quickly with the walker in the hospital halls. Little by little, I lengthened my stride so that I was sort of running. That’s when I set myself a goal of running a 5K, which I did three months after that. By then, I was released from the hospital and honorably discharged from the Air Force, and I was back in Springfield, where I decided to go back to school for criminology. While in school, I kept running: 5Ks, then 10Ks, then half-marathons, then I started doing trails and got hooked on running through the mountains around here. Eventually, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago, I did my first ultra. It was brutal and amazing—my feet looked like hamburger meat. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. And I’ve been doing them ever since.

“Oh my god. That’s an unbelievable story, Bryan. Like, I can’t process everything you’ve just told me. But your courage and determination are so impressive. You should tell people this story.” Somehow, the magical parting of the sea of beefy construction workers is now completely explained. 

“Oh, I do, thanks. I go to public schools all the time to talk to the kids there.”

“Man, that’s great! They must be blown away.”

“Well, I just hope that it helps. If even one kid is inspired to set and stick to a goal, I’m happy.” 

“That’s beautiful! What an impressive person you are! But wait, did you finally get your criminology degree? What do you do for work now?”

“I’m an undercover FBI agent.”

“Shut the fuck up. You are not.” I look in the mirror. Bryan is grinning.

“Yes sir, Santiago, I am.”

“Wait, wait. What does that even mean?”

“Well, I work undercover as part of a special task force investigating fentanyl trafficking in upstate New York and Western Massachusetts. I work mostly in Holyoke.” I’m wondering if the scrawny-looking body combined with scruffy facial hair helped him pass as a drug dealer or user or whatever he poses as, but it feels rude to ask. 

“The thing is: the product that’s coming through now is way, way more dangerous than what people who first got hooked on pharmaceutical opioids are used to. It’s laced and altered, and people have no idea. No idea at all what they’re putting into their bodies. Like, we test the stuff we confiscate and one time the shit got on my skin and it just burned. Like acid. Anyway, Holyoke’s kind of the epicenter in this region.”

I think of the many passengers from Holyoke who I’ve driven to and from rehab facilities and methadone clinics. 

We’re driving in that direction, so I asked him if he lives in Holyoke. He looks at me in the mirror for a second, catches my gaze, and just stares with a half-smile as if waiting. Then I understand. Of course, he doesn’t live in Holyoke. He’s an undercover cop, not a method actor. He can’t live where he works. Seeing that I get it, Bryan now smiles fully. 

“Right, no. I just live up in this complex at the bottom of the mountain. It’s perfect. I go out my back door and can do my runs on the mountain.” As we pull into the steep drive winding up toward the little cluster of apartments at the foot of Mount Tom, Bryan tells me something about his next race, a 100-miler in New Hampshire. But I don’t take it in. My head is still swimming. I just wish him luck, and as we stop, I put the car in park and turn to face him as he gathers his backpack.

“Thank you for sharing your story with me, Bryan. You’ve inspired me.” Bryan winks.

“No problem. Thanks for the ride, Santiago. It’s good talking to you.” Then he was gone, and as I pulled away, Uber notified me he’d just tipped me $8.77—maybe 50 percent, a big tip.

For the rest of the day, I was enthralled. Distracted by the power of Bryan’s story, I found myself trying to put the flesh of feeling and time onto the skeletal version he’d given me: 911, shot in the neck, paralyzed, little chance of walking, ultra-marathons, undercover FBI, sheer force of will. 

A couple of days later, the story still resonating, I shared it with my older brother.

“Sounds like a pretty good bullshitter,” he chuckled, thinking that was the point of my telling him.

But, though Bryan’s story was precisely unbelievable, it had not occurred to me for even an instant to disbelieve him. After my brother’s remark, I paused for a moment, images quickly passing through my mind: the ace bandages around Bryan’s forearms, near his elbows. Was he hiding track marks? His FBI hat. Would an undercover FBI agent wear an FBI beanie? Could he afford that big tip? And that wink? What was that about? Wouldn’t everything he told me be a perfect cover story for a fentanyl dealer? But no, why? Why bother?

“Maybe,” I replied. “But I’d rather believe it.”

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