Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Where do you even find paint that color?” she asked.

  “Oh. It’s not paint.”

  “No?”

  “Nah. It’s hipster blood. Turns out, when you flog one of those half-beards to death, he bleeds out in the color scheme of the 1980s.”

  “Har har.” Jed’s joking about his hipster cohort in Marfa was one of his few conversational go-tos, as if to prove to Eve he was different from all the vaguely artistic layabouts with whom he shared that town.

  “Hey, where do you go to drown a hipster?” Jed asked. “The mainstream.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.”

  Jed’s smile widened a tick too far, became a baring of clenched teeth through which he said, “Sorry.”

  The reception’s swinging door seemed to move, but then it failed to open.

  “No, you know what?” Jed said. “Screw you. You don’t get to tell me how to deal with this.”

  Jed was doing that tight smile thing he did when he got mad. Eve nodded earnestly, gladdened and more than a little surprised by Jed’s anger, the acknowledgment of what was at stake today. “No, screw you,” Eve said, too loudly. She glanced over to find the plump, heavily powdered receptionist grinning behind her desk, her amused eyes informing Eve that later she would be sure to tell her fellow employees of this latest encounter.

  Oh, Eve knew what they thought of her, all those nurses and assistants. But Eve had spent four hours a day, six days a week beside Bed Four, and she had learned the routines the doctors prescribed, down to the minute. And so what was Eve supposed to do when the nurses were thirty minutes late in connecting the lunchtime sack of Jevity to Oliver’s gastrostomy tube, not mention it? Was she supposed to remain silent when Oliver’s colostomy bags overfilled, spilling foulness over his belly? And was she, too, supposed to not raise hell when the nurses failed to rotate his body as often as they should and his pressure sores grew so severe that his fever broke out in a drenching sweat, his hospital gown going translucent against his grayish skin? Should she not mention the unclipped nails with which Oliver’s spasming arms could badly scratch himself? The circulation problem that could make his toes and fingers go icy, nearly gangrenous? “Tell me,” she often asked the chief nurse, Helen, “am I supposed to just stay silent?”

  “All I’m saying,” Nurse Helen often recited, in their endless argument over the years, “is that no one else seems to make such a fuss.”

  But they hardly even came, those children and grandchildren of the dementia and stroke cases babbling down the halls in their wheelchairs and their robes. Eve had come to suspect, by the general failure to visit other than holidays and the occasional hour on the weekend, the true purpose of this institution.

  Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, Eve had learned, was a place where people in a particular predicament could displace the burden of their guilt. When stroke or head trauma or Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s collapsed a mind and the body beneath did not follow, what was a family to do? Places like Crockett State existed to allow families to commit the coward’s form of patricide, matricide, fratricide, filicide: to cede care of your loved one to this place, to tell yourself that you had done everything you could, and then, in the quiet indifference of that institution, to let some infection accomplish the act you didn’t have the courage to commit.

  Eve would not allow herself that cowardice. She perfected her warning face and would never reward the nurses and doctors with gratitude when they merely followed the prescribed treatments. Eve could feel that her own fixed and pleading eyes were a kind of second and more dependable electricity that powered all those devices, that it was her unblinking gaze that kept the machines clicking and sighing, that fixed Oliver to life. If she let herself look away from the panic of his eyes, the swatting of his reedy arms, the jaundiced pallor of his face, the G-tube might fail, the infection of his bedsores might reach his heart, and Oliver would slip away from her.

  To the doctors and nurses, Oliver was just the patient in Bed Four who needed his linens changed. Only Eve was left now to fight for the actual Oliver, the one none of them could know. The boy who loved Bob Dylan, poetry, science fiction, and tall tales. The boy who always insisted everyone stop to look at the sunset, no matter how plain.

  Once, watching an old episode of Oprah, Eve heard the widow of a 9/11 victim explain that the hardest part was that in her mind, she continued the conversation with her husband, “just as if he were still there, until I remember he isn’t.” Eve did the same, with the difference that she really had this conversation out loud. She followed Oliver’s favorite filmmakers and writers, and she read to him the reviews of their movies and books. She tried to keep Oliver abreast of the news, both international and domestic. She recalled her occasional phone calls with Charlie in vehement detail.

  The extent of her motherly faith: Eve really did imagine, and then believe, in Oliver’s answers, just on the other side of his trembling skull. When once, during an uncommonly tranquil phone conversation with Charlie, she had mentioned this thought, Charlie told her he wasn’t surprised. “Really?” she asked. “Do you sometimes think the same? Then why don’t you come for a visit? Why—”

  “What I mean, Ma, is that I’m not surprised that you can go on talking without worrying about a reply. Let’s just say I have some, uh, firsthand experience with that particular phenomenon.”

  “I don’t know what you could possibly mean.”

  “It’s your way,” Charlie told her. “When you don’t want to accept something, you just talk and talk, like your talking can make a different kind of world come to be.”

  “Oh, this again.”

  “Believe me, Ma, I’m as tired of it as you are. But maybe if you would just try listening for once? Maybe, for once, you could ask me a question about my life? Maybe you might be interested in hearing what I have to say?”

  That conversation had ended as nearly all her conversations with Charlie ended, the receiver conducting a thrumming silence until Eve invented some excuse to hang up. Things were different and awful now, but they still ran along the old lines. A mother didn’t deliberately pick favorites, but she couldn’t help it if one child was more her than the other, just as she couldn’t help if one inherited her coltish ankles, the elfin aspect of her ears, her curls. There were people like Eve and Oliver, who understood that survival demanded endless contemplation and skepticism of others’ easy ideas, and then there were people like Charlie and Jed, who moved through life like a car at night, never able to see farther than their own dim headlights, blindly trusting the world’s dark roads. If there was one modest silver lining to this worst day, it was the phone call she’d get to make to Charlie when it was all over. Whatever the result, she could hope it might summon him home, make him finally see what he had left her to.

  The door at last swung open. Professor Nickell looked deeply into his clipboard, a lost man scrutinizing a map. “Mr. and Mrs. Loving?”

  “Now?” She scratchily whispered the word, a sound like an unscreamable scream from a nightmare.

  “Well.” Nickell was already edging back to the door. “No need to rush. We’re still getting him ready.”

  “Eve,” Jed said as she hoisted herself out of the chair, shoved her way to the ladies’ room. She almost did not make it to the toilet in time. She had not been able to eat that morning, and in the spotless, thrumming stall, only a few drops of ocher acid trickled from her mouth. The truth was that, in nearly every one of those “miracle” stories she had read, the patient did not exactly “wake up.” In nearly all of them, a new doctor or scientist simply discovered that the patient had been awake and aware all along, that the patient had only been wrongly diagnosed by antiquated technology or incompetent doctors. And what sort of doctors worked at Crockett State? What sort of a man was Dr. Rumble?

  On the slate-blue tile of the ladies’ room floor, Eve snapped open her purse and felt for the reassuring shape, half of her somehow hoping she had not actually lifted it from the
desk of Ron Towers. But there it was, in her palm. A glistening new phone, which was really just a screen, whose lit face showed Ron Towers delivering a half-nelson to a chubby ten-year-old with Ron’s shiny, rosacea-ruddy features. She wondered if Ron had yet noticed its absence. She thought of some surreptitious way to return the thing. And yet, more alluring was the inexorable thought of her son’s hands, returned to him, manipulating the glass face of this device. Geez, how long was I out?

  Eve slipped the phone back into her purse. She rose from the tile floor and ran her palms over the gray polyester blend of her business suit. She freshened her face in the mirror, cupped handfuls of water into her mouth, but could not quell the dryness in her throat.

  Back in reception, Eve nodded at Professor Nickell and Dr. Rumble, and the men led her and Jed out into the parking lot, where that trailer that held the fMRI waited, where her son had already been transferred. Eve made the most of the short walk across the apron of asphalt, looking out at the apathetic enormity of the slaggy country, the mountains purple with the false coolness of distance. She trailed Jed into a gray-walled room inside the trailer, a little booth behind a Plexiglas partition, the fMRI just on the other side.

  Over the last decade, Eve had watched as machines took over Oliver’s body; they had colonized his gastrointestinal regions, his systems both muscular and urinary. And now, as she watched his body shudder into the humming plastic aperture of the fMRI, she had the crazy apprehension that the transformation was about to be complete. As if once the key of her son’s awareness docked into the machine, it might suddenly throw forth a holographic image, a Wizard of Oz face, which at last would speak back to her.

  And yet, Oliver was in the machine now, electromagnetic energies penetrating the dome of his skull, and to the doctors he was still only a twitching, thoughtless body, a specimen. As the massive computers began to hum, Professor Nickell explained to Eve and Jed what would come next. He pointed their attention to a screen, which showed a human skull in profile. Oliver’s skull: a mother could recognize it immediately, even electronically bisected.

  Eve looked at the technicians’ screens. She was a forty-nine-year-old mother of a massive-head-trauma victim observing the results of an fMRI and she was a forty-year-old woman carrying laundry through the rooms of Zion’s Pastures on the night of November fifteenth, when the shaken, emergency-lit image of Bliss Township School on the television caught her eye. Today, the ruin that was left of the man she had married felt for her hand, but Jed also spoke to her, on the telephone, from all those years ago. “Eve—” her name the start of his wail that was not quite human, something animal and dying.

  “What? What is it? Tell me. What happened?”

  Eve had tried to turn away from the ticking clocks of this world, but time was a vexing, irrefutable math, a tally of prison wall scratches that her counting fingers couldn’t resist feeling for in the dark. On that morning, Oliver had been lost in his body for 3,537 days. Leaning into the Plexiglas divide, Eve felt herself grabbing Jed’s arm, ropier than before, but the rolling pin shape of it still achingly familiar. She held it against her belly.

  And it was odd that it was now, of all times, that a certain memory came worming back into Eve’s awareness, from the heavy soil she had long ago heaped upon it. It was something she’d seen on the television coverage in the worst days after, playing in the hospital waiting room. Amid the softly droning montage of police officers and weeping students, Eve had seen a single long shot of that girl she had met only once, that night at Zion’s Pastures. Only two of the theater kids had made it out of that room wholly unscathed: Ella Brew, who had concealed herself behind the teacher’s desk, and also the person Eve now saw on the TV monitor. Rebekkah Sterling, a pale, auburn-haired whisper of a girl, not answering the reporters as she sauntered off into the darkness beyond the school. Rebekkah Sterling ambling away from the violence that had ended the lives of her classmates, set free to disappear into the parking lot shadows.

  Eve had never seen her again. Whatever questions Eve had at that moment, Rebekkah carried off with her into that darkness and the years that followed. And yet, what happened that day, what was happening right now inside the fMRI machine in the Crockett State parking lot—the two days, in some unknowable science, were the same blind second, the same question, still unanswered. Why? Despite all her vehement claims to the contrary, despite the rational part of her knowing better, Eve couldn’t help but feel that at last she was standing at the precipice of some vast and otherworldly presence, that she was finally at the edge of an answer to why this unimaginable fate had chosen her family. That November fifteenth and this July twenty-second, almost ten years later, were connected by the immeasurable heaviness of one of those black holes that once fascinated Jed, pulverizing time, dematerializing her body, atom by atom. Was there light on the other side? Was there anything at all on the other side? Even now, looking at her son’s brain coming into the screens, Eve couldn’t know: Should she let herself hope, for her own sake, that it would show something, or would it be much better, for her son’s sake, if it showed nothing at all?

  The professor presented Eve with a big radio announcer’s microphone, its output piped through the speakers hung on Oliver’s side of the partition. She clenched a fist, struggled to gather enough air to shape a word. And when Eve did speak, it came out very loudly. “Oliver!”

  Oliver

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Oliver! A shot across the void.

  Oliver, when you were twelve years old you brought home a library book you’d found about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. Remember it? It was the technical aspect that impressed you most. The distance between the buildings was vast, and Petit couldn’t just toss the 450-pound heft of his tightrope across the chasm. To establish that bridge, first he used a piece of fishing line, which he attached to an arrow that he shot from one roof to the next. Once the line was in place, Petit and his team used it to pull across a thicker string, then a cord, then a rope, and at last they could tug across the steel cable that would let Petit walk into the sky.

  Oliver: a single spoken name, and already your family could feel a string drawing taut, the abyss bridged, the line to you thickening with detail. The oily swirl of your hair, like a follicular bonfire. The dreamy, abstracted way you’d sit through a dinner. A teenage-sweet diffidence that could make your every footstep seem tentative, an apology for itself. A seventeen-year-old boy, unnoticed in his school days, becoming visible again.

  And it wasn’t only your family who came to your bed to try to restore you with a name. “Oliver,” the people of your town would say, as their weary faces bent over your bed: a tearful, waddled Mrs. Schumacher, a mustache-fondling Doyle Dixon, a Christianly singing Mrs. Wolcott, a couple of that night’s limping survivors, a number of pimple-scraping classmates. Once, even Hector Espina Sr. snuck in to see you, looking down at your body like a darkness to which his eyes could never adjust. Of course, you had been practically a stranger to the great majority of those people and so it was not just grief that brought them to your bed. It was that one same question: Why? And though you could not answer, they too could feel the connection to you taking on the heft of the specifics they remembered. Mrs. Schumacher talked to you about the poem you had written: “I never told you how beautiful—” Doyle Dixon blubbered about your first day of kindergarten, when you had brought him an ancient horseshoe you’d found. Your classmates hardly spoke at all; they just looked on, remembering the nervous way you’d skirt the school’s masses, wondering if your quiet had been some kind of an omen of what was to come. “Oliver,” they would say, again and again, and though you could never make a reply, every one of your visitors could sense it: an explanation that was still somewhere out there, in that impassable, far tower of your memory.

  It took Petit’s team about an hour to draw across a series of cords until they fastened the cable that let him cross from one building to the next; it would take your family an
d the people of your town much longer. It would take ten years. But at last, Oliver, in this story split in two, there you are: taking your early tentative steps into that chasm. There you are, walking into your own next chapter, on one September night.

  * * *

  It was September fifteenth, just over two months before. A brightness was in your eyes, the dazzle of stadium lights. Banks of them, high over the Bliss Stadium, lighting the first football game in what would prove to be the final season of the Bliss Township Mountain Lions. Though, of course, no one could have known it then. The Mountain Lions would win that night. No one had any reason to suspect that the good times would not go on and on.

  It had been more than three weeks since that night Rebekkah came to your family’s ranch, and there you were, in the artificial daylight of 8 P.M., September ninth, just an ungainly high school junior, ascending and descending the concrete stadium steps, a paper envelope of a hat on your head, a tray of peanuts and Coke cups strapped over your shoulders. A truly miserable job for a boy like you, who wanted only to pass unseen. Each school club took a turn at stadium concessions, a way to raise a little funding, and that week the task fell to you as dutiful president of your father’s Young Astronomers.

  According to an article Pa clipped from an old issue of Scientific American and stapled to the bulletin board of his art classroom, which also hosted the bimonthly meetings of the Young Astronomers Club, America’s very best stargazing was in your mountainous region, unpolluted by the light of civilization. (“I’m not sure if that is a claim to fame or shame,” Ma told him.) It was true what the song said, the stars at night really were big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. But the Friday night lights, the megawattage that lit your matches against the Odessa Bronchos, the El Paso Tigers, the Alpine Bucks, were much brighter.

  “Hey, Pizza Face! Are you yelling penis? Ha ha! I don’t want your fucking penis, Pizza Face. Stop trying to sell me your penis!”