Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Despite what he would say about it later, she and Charlie (somehow, implausibly) had many peaceable, quiet days together at Zion’s Pastures, in the company of Charlie’s snorty new dog, Edwina. Charlie and Eve had to cling tightly together then. That worst night, when a chaplain had brought Charlie to the hospital, he had moved through the hallways as if they were filled with water, his quick little movements now liquid slow, his face panicked and drowning. “When do we go home?” His words had burbled out of him, from some dark and frigid depth. “Soon,” she told him, and eventually they did go back to Zion’s Pastures, but of course they never really went home again. Shocking to consider now: in that first year of homeschooling, they had used “love you” like punctuation.

  One March afternoon, Dr. Rumble summoned what remained of Eve’s family into the turquoise and beige tones of his southwestern-motif office, “to make a decision.”

  “It is very important,” Dr. Rumble explained, his ringed fingers pinching the quill of a potted cactus, “that you have no illusions here. Sometimes, you see, death doesn’t look like what you’d expect. It is awful to say it, but I feel I must be very clear. From everything we’ve seen in our tests and observations over the last months, we just can’t see any reason to believe that Oliver is still with us. And—this is the hardest part, I know it—the question that you must begin to ask yourselves now is whether you want to keep his body alive.”

  Eve looked at Jed and Charlie then, but for a long while no one said anything more. Eve rocked forward in her seat, braced herself on her knees. “Ma?” Charlie said, and all at once Eve straightened in her chair. Liar!: The word spat out of Eve’s mouth unbidden, like something sickly and viscous her lungs had coughed up. “That’s a lie,” Eve shouted at the doctor in his armchair. But Dr. Rumble only puckered his lips, curiously tipping his head, as if Eve weren’t quite speaking English.

  In manic bouts of googling, Eve found online several stories of patients like Oliver, patients given those same dire labels of Persistent Vegetative State and Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, who nevertheless emerged from their long paralysis. The chance of a similar miracle befalling her son—less than one-hundredth of one percent—was the little datum she clung to, a fraying rope that kept her from falling into the darkness that had already swallowed her husband. Sometimes, even still, she thought that she could feel in Oliver’s clammy left hand something other than the infinite, mindless tremble. Dr. Rumble promised her it was involuntary, just a variation on a perpetually misfiring nervous system. And when Dr. Rumble again enquired about the subject he had raised that terrible day in his office? “We’re still thinking,” Eve told the doctor many times in the weeks and months that passed, unaware, as the grieving can be, that her indecision was becoming the decision.

  Over the years that followed, only one outside visitor continued to arrive regularly at Bed Four. Every three months or so, a man named Manuel Paz would make his way into the room with his slow, wide saunter. Manuel was a kind of police officer, a captain from the Presidio County office of the Texas Rangers, who was also a third-generation Blissian. In Eve’s first months in the Big Bend, she had met Manuel Paz a couple of times on Main Street. Even back then, he had seemed like some biological antique, a fleshy, quiet-stoic Texan of yore, almost comforting in his anachronism, a character from a movie about an older Texas, one in which white and Mexican settlers slugged whiskey in the same saloon. But now he had become something else to Eve. Not an official detective—that whole task force had arrived to Bliss, appointed by the governor—but of all those apathetic half-wits Manuel always seemed the only officer who actually cared. “Just thought I’d check in on you folks, see how y’all are faring,” Manuel would always say in his sun-dried avuncular way.

  All those other officials had gone quickly back to Austin, stuffing loose ends into their bureaucratic attaché cases. It wasn’t their town; it was Manuel’s town. A town that was hardly even a town at all anymore, disintegrated now into those questions that perhaps only the boy in Bed Four could ever have helped answer. And yet, whatever his doomed motives, Eve was grateful to have at least this one other partner in her hope. “What’s new?” Manuel would ask, his gaze quickly falling to Oliver as if, at last, some answer might be in the offing.

  “Same as ever,” Eve told him, again and again.

  And here, Eve would have liked to tell her younger son, was what real fortitude looked like. Even now, even after every good thing had fallen away from her, the future occurrence of that so-called miracle still felt as solid to her as any object she slipped into her purse. She had lost Charlie to college, then to New York City. She had lost her family money, and Jed had long ago quit teaching, hardly turning minimum wage now in his new reception job at a poorly touristed new tourist resort, out in Lajitas. She had lost her home, selling off her husband’s ranch to a family called the Quades. She had nearly lost her sanity. She had lost any discernible future. And at last, in recent months, she had lost what little remained of the money from the sale of Zion’s Pastures, hardly scraping by now on the tiny monthly sum she received from the fund the governor established for victims of that night and her occasional copyediting work for The Holy Light, a local, televangelically funded publisher of fundamentalist books of Bible stories for children, whose commas, semicolons, and run-on homilies she corrected.

  Two months ago, as Eve felt her life approaching a new crisis point, Dr. Rumble had called her back into his mini–cactus garden of an office, where a second presence, a bearded, ferrety man, stood to greet her. This was Professor Alexander Nickell, all the way from Princeton University, who presented Eve with “a very exciting opportunity.”

  This very exciting opportunity was Professor Nickell’s newfangled functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, which he was planning to take on a long road trip of the nation’s vegetative cases, and this visit to Crockett State was apparently part of his scouting mission. “What we want to study,” Nickell said, as neutrally as if he were speaking to colleagues in a lecture hall, “is how brain death warps and shrinks the size of the organ. We’ve been looking for people like Oliver, but they aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.”

  “No, they aren’t,” Eve said.

  “What I mean to say”—Professor Nickell pinched at the tight crop of his mustache, as if feeling for its vanished handlebar—“is that they are very special.”

  “Warps and shrinks?” she asked.

  “Yes, there are fascinating structural changes to the brain…”

  Eve lost the thread of the professor’s lecture, but she didn’t need to listen. A diligent researcher like herself could not have failed to read about this new sort of fMRI, showing neural activity at microscopic levels, and she of course knew all about how brains of vegetative-state patients were known to shrivel from inactivity. In the first months after, among the many EEGs and reflex tests, Oliver had undergone a few rounds on an earlier form of such a machine, all of which, according to Oliver’s weathered chief physician, showed Oliver’s brain’s activity reduced to its core, its cerebellum, its so-called reptilian brain, a dim bulb of dendritic light just above his spinal cord that kept his heart beating, his lungs breathing. When Dr. Rumble shined flashlights into Oliver’s eyes, they did not dilate properly; when Dr. Rumble rubbed his sternum, Oliver did not lift a hand to bat him away. “Anything? Anything different?” Eve had begged Dr. Rumble many times.

  “To tell you the truth, I have to admit I’m just doing these tests for your sake. This charade probably isn’t good for anyone.”

  “Charade? Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Rumble had told her, “you are entitled to another opinion if you’d like. There’s a brain center out in El Paso I could refer you to, but I should tell you the place ain’t cheap.”

  But why, really, had Eve not insisted? It was true she couldn’t afford it, but of course that was not the reason. The true, unspeakable reason: as Oliver spent months and then years untested, Eve developed
a kind of private faith around the lack of quality medical assessment, a faith that spread from that inextinguishable word miracle. As if, as long as she could believe that the structure were still intact, it somehow, miraculously, might be capable of life. A new fMRI, Eve understood, might at last force her to see what the doctors saw when they looked at Oliver. Not a trapped and pleading intelligence, not Oliver’s eyes searching, in that fast, flitting way they moved, for an escape from his neurofibral thickets. Only a decimated nervous system, misfiring.

  Still, Eve had told herself countless times that soon she would insist Oliver undergo testing on the new sorts of brain scans she had read about, the ones that could offer a far more detailed image of neural activity than the clunky, outdated model that their humble little county hospital had employed. Next month, she’d tell herself, sometimes going so far as to write the date into her calendar when she would make the phone call. And yet, the next month came and went, and always there were so many reasons to put it off just another month longer: Oliver had come down with a case of pneumonia, she worried about transferring him in the outrageous summer heat, she had too much of her own copyediting work to get done, her finances were at a particularly dire moment. She put it off and put it off, until her putting it off became its own kind of superstition, a ritual in her life. The longer she delayed that second opinion, the more dire its potential outcomes, the more she could not bear to schedule it.

  But at last, almost ten years after, sitting there with Dr. Rumble and his visitor from Princeton, the faith around which she had arranged her years had come to its end. Ten years: that number repeated itself now like a second pulse in her temples. “Eve,” Dr. Rumble said after Professor Nickell, glowing with his own informativeness, completed his lecture. “I think this is an opportunity we’d be foolish to refuse. There might not be much we can do for Oliver now, but if the professor here could help at least understand others like him—well, why would we say no?”

  Because that last hope is all that’s left, Eve did not say. “I suppose you’re right,” she said instead, and Dr. Rumble looked relieved, dabbing his goatee with the back of his hand.

  “The thing is,” Professor Nickell added, “we’ll need your husband to agree, too.” Eve wrote down Jed’s phone number on the back of Nickell’s business card.

  “I’ll leave that part up to you,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Crockett State Assisted Care Facility was a two-floor stucco cube beyond the dust and gore of insect death polluting Eve’s windshield. The repository of her thoughts, labors, hopes, godless prayers looked almost comically diminished from that distance. An outpost on Mars. And her son lived in an outpost of the outpost, the only head trauma patient currently in residence, the balance of the unit’s patients afflicted with garden-variety cognitive impairments, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy, aneurysms and strokes. Oliver was the facility’s youngest resident by forty years at least. A few times a week, an ambulance came to cart one of the geriatrics to emergency care in Alpine or Marathon.

  But today, parked just beyond the side door, was another kind of vehicle, one that loomed much larger than its humble RV dimensions: Professor Nickell’s truck, tricked out like one of those mobile blood donation centers, which displayed, in a flourish of corporate logo design, the words PRINCETON MIND-BRAIN CENTER. When Eve reached to unbuckle the seat belt, her back distress blew its buckshot, strafing her from pelvis to shoulder blade.

  And now, just before undertaking the arduous work of climbing out of Goliath, Eve paused to let a certain presence pass by, not ten feet in front of her windshield. Margot Strout, in her new bouffant and floral-themed blazer, a golden cross swinging from her neck, pretended not to notice Eve sitting there in her car, as Margot worked her thighs in an awkward scamper.

  Margot Strout—the speech pathologist who visited Crockett State three times a week, to help the stroke and dementia cases produce a few words for visiting family and caregivers—was considered something of a saint in that fluorescent-grim institution. She was a blast of excoriating sunshine, a Jesus-loving lady who wore her makeup in operatic proportions, her piney perfume like some chemical weapon attack, her hair teased up to the heavens. According to the story Eve had heard the woman relate many times, Margot had once been the single mother of a baby girl, Cora, who was born with severe birth defects. Cora’s mental impairment had kept her from speaking before she died at the age of four, and to the facility’s workers, visitors, and Eve herself, Margot had gone on and on about her “calling,” about “giving a voice back to the voiceless.”

  But what about the most voiceless of all the Crockett State residents? At last, seven or so years ago now, Margot had agreed to give a little of her time to Oliver. “From what Dr. Rumble says,” Margot told Eve, “you truly cannot expect a speech pathologist will do him any good at this point. But believe me, Eve, I know what it can mean to have someone at least try. You should have seen me, the way I used to badger the doctors about my Cora.”

  The next week, Margot had come down to work at Bed Four. Margot spent nine hours with Oliver, nine agonizing hours during which Eve had to wait in the lobby, a dangerous hope like a pestle grinding against the stone of her skepticism, her stomach pinched in between. Because of Oliver’s draconian insurance policy, Margot worked pro bono that day, and so Eve didn’t want to pester the woman, but when Eve looked through the little window into Oliver’s room, she was a little appalled at what it apparently meant for Margot to “try”: Margot seemed only to be speaking softly to Oliver, putting her hands gently against his body, scanning Oliver’s twitchings with her fingers. And at the end of just a single day palpating the patient, Margot seconded the doctors’ diagnosis. “Just involuntary tremors, I’m afraid,” Margot said, in a voice that was unbearable in its pity. “Nothing he can control. I’m so sorry.”

  “One day and you just give up.”

  “No, Eve,” Margot told her. “I’m not giving up. It’s just the truth. And, speaking from some personal experience, the truth is the hardest part.”

  The automatic doors into the squat stucco box of Crockett State now shushed open at Eve’s arrival, and she was stunned by the face she found there, waiting for her to arrive.

  “Jed.”

  It had been nearly a year since Eve had seen her husband and she had to swallow a gasp at what that time had done. Jed’s coveralls were spattered with paint and grime, his face was as still and sun pleated as a taxidermy desert animal in a display case. She was looking at the rind of a man, his lips puckered, his eyes red and troubled, his cheeks twin bushels of gin blossoms, his fingers yellowed and quaking.

  “Eve.”

  Jed stood and came for her, extending his arms to strike an image almost perfectly identical to the Crockett State logo emblazoned on the Band-Aid-colored façade outside. Jed’s smell was sharp and sour; she felt the bristle of his thinning hair against her cheek. To her chagrin, her eyes watered. “I never thought you’d be here.”

  “Of course I came. I’ve been counting the days. I can’t believe it has finally come,” Jed said in a close voice.

  “I can’t, either.” So this was what July twenty-second looked like. It looked like any other blazing summer day, terrible for its normalcy. Nothing and no one here, other than her husband and the RV, to mark what was about to happen. She felt it was hideous that Jed should show up today, acting like he’d been some partner in all this. He was a trespasser.

  But the worst part was that, on a number of occasions, Eve had tried tentatively to crack open the long-sealed gates of their marriage. From time to time, in the first years after Charlie left for college, Eve would call Jed and invite him to visit Crockett State, as if the man needed an invitation, as if they had decided their son belonged only to her. At Oliver’s bed, Jed was always a tremulous, stammering, teary wreck, sitting at a distance, as if his son’s paralysis might be contagious. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’d say, as if the thing had
just happened. And yet, after visiting hours, she’d always ask Jed back to her house at Desert Splendor for dinner. Dinner—ha! They rarely ate.

  Why? Was she trying somehow to undo the thing she had done on that last night before, now shimmying her backside against him? No, it was only for the release. Only for those few tumbling, sweating minutes when, for once, she was not thinking of much at all, her mind an empty place, just a bell in which a clapper struck. And yet, after it was over, they came back into their aging skins, the shopworn roles they had long played in the theater of the family Loving. Jed silent, Eve incredulous. After each of their dozen or so “dinners,” her husband just acted like one of those bovine-eyed security guys, never saying much or asking much of her, never making her tell the truth about the way she was living, how things had become between Charlie and her, the lengthy conversations she conducted with their silent son in his hospital bed. A life so dire that often, turning the wedding ring on her finger, she could surprise herself to remember she was still a wife.

  Waiting for Professor Nickell to appear, Eve and Jed shared a silence in their stiff upholstered chairs. Deep in Eve’s gut, the giddiness of her shoplifting and the panic of this appointment did battle, a hot column of something advancing up her chest. Her dread was expansive, taking in everything around her now: the splashy comic-book hues of the vintage western movie posters decorating the walls, the gaudy receptionist, Peggy, clacking at her keyboard, the crackle and wheeze of the facility’s air-conditioning, the antique horseshoe bolted over the entranceway for good luck. She couldn’t bear the silence a second longer, and she pointed to the neon purple spatter on Jed’s jeans.