Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  You would spend the following weekend writing poems. In your creekside cave, you would press play on your Casio boom box, cuing up your other muse, as recorded on Blood on the Tracks. Oh, sing to me, Bob Dylan! I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form / Come in she said I’ll give ya / shelter from the storm. But on Monday, you would wait in your seat in Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom for a full hour. Just five minutes before the school bell rang, you would at last admit that Rebekkah wasn’t coming to see you.

  But there was still that backward grin. Of all the many horrors, bad decisions, missed chances that would follow, that would become the moment that perhaps would torment you most. The undelivered joy of that second at the football stadium, the question you would come to live inside—it would take a near decade, and the boy presently turning out a small nut fortune in the rafters, to find an explanation that could bridge the abyss. But at last, there he was: nearly ten years later, your brother taking his own first wobbly tightrope-walker steps over that crevasse, to come find you.

  Charlie

  CHAPTER SIX

  “If you want to know the story of Charles Loving,” Charlie often liked to tell the guys he saw in Brooklyn, “here is a good introduction for you. One of my first memories is of a city I did not actually see.”

  It was true. One of Charlie’s first lucid memories—a memory with clear lines rising out of the blurry brown phantasmagoria of his desert childhood—was of New York City, an impossible island of towers hovering over the plains.

  Reason would later tell Charlie that it must have been downtown Houston that he actually saw that night, when he blinked his eyes open in the backseat of his family’s old VW. But in a picture book Pa had recently given him for his fifth birthday, Charlie had studied images of Manhattan’s towers, and when he saw that gleaming bank of lights, he knew the name for it. “New York City!”

  “Ha ha!” Pa laughed. “There it is my boy, New York City! And ain’t she a beaut?”

  New York City, a miracle! And a miracle was what Charlie needed that night. Actually, all the Lovings were in need of a miracle, if only an invented one, to redeem the week they had just endured.

  It had been a miserable little road trip, that July. It was Granny Nunu’s seventieth birthday, and for her present she had insisted that “the whole damned clan” accompany her on a trip to the beaches of Galveston. She wouldn’t hear her son’s apprehension. “After seventy blasted years of dust,” Granny said, “don’t you think it’s time I deserve a little water?”

  But the sea they had found at the island of Galveston was just like Texan desert: flat, lifeless, overheated, rich with petroleum. An oil tanker had recently spilled its black guts in the Gulf of Mexico, and their footsteps exposed the tacky slick of oil beneath the khaki sand. The apathetic waves tossed a confetti of tar balls. And Galveston itself seemed on its way to becoming the set of a horror film. The attractions on the old boardwalks were in disrepair—decapitated carousel ponies, a shuttered oceanfront bar whose collapsed tiki huts resembled the abandoned nesting place of some prehistoric bird-monster. Their rooms, at the Texan Paradise Hotel, were damply carpeted, tangy with a vaguely septic smell.

  Charlie and his brother spent the week building perfunctory cities from the reeking sand, their hands growing tarred and unwashable. Beneath a plastic umbrella, their parents disappeared into their paperbacks. And as for Granny Nunu? Poor Granny: when a swift, brutal case of pneumonia ended her life just six months later, this trip would come to seem a grim farewell tour, as if the true cause of death had not been a pulmonary infection but rather her outrage at a transformed Texas she could never cotton to. She spent those Galveston days inside the planetary circumference of her straw hat, tsk-tsking and shaking her head at the disappointment. “You shoulda seen this place before the hurricane hit. It was the greatest Texas city of them all! A true tragedy.”

  “Ma.” Pa looked up from his edition of Contact. “That hurricane hit in, what, 1900? You weren’t even alive. Your parents weren’t even alive.”

  Granny Nunu shook her head once more. “You shoulda seen it then.”

  On their fifth night at Galveston, as they all suffered the torture of a silent crab dinner at a restaurant called Fish ’n’ Chips Ahoy!, Granny smacked a female carapace with a mallet, like a judge ready to offer a verdict. “If you are all so miserable, then let’s just go home now.” The only real spirit of vacation Charlie had known, on his first and arguably only family road trip, was to pile into the station wagon that night. Back in the VW, Charlie had fallen immediately asleep, relieved to think he would wake up back among their home’s many acres.

  But then, blinking out of his dreams, New York City! A billion twinkling mirrors, the geometric shapes of buildings outlined in neon, upturned floodlights ablaze. Charlie unbuckled his seat belt, pressed his face to the glass.

  “And look!” Ma was driving that night, and even she was getting in on the act now, pointing to what must have been the Enron tower. “That huge skyscraper there, that’s called the Empire State Building.”

  “Charlie!” Oliver said. “Did you see it? I just saw the Statue of Liberty!”

  “Where? Where?”

  Ma was rocking with laughter. From joy, Charlie assumed.

  The New York City Charlie knew about came from Pa’s picture book but also from the panels of The Amazing Spider-Man he couldn’t yet read, the brightly saturated hues of the “Broadway Melody” montage in Singin’ in the Rain, the stylized black-and-whites of the film noirs that Ma sometimes let him watch with her. “Can we stop? Are we going to stop? I want to see it.”

  “Um,” Ma said. “Maybe it’s time to stop torturing the boy.”

  Pa, sitting next to Ma in the front seat, turned to face Charlie. He reached to put a hand on Charlie’s arm.

  “That city,” he said, “is no place for kids. But someday, when you are all grown up, you should run off for it the first chance you get. No place for kids, but believe your pa when he tells you that our little town is no place for grown-ups.”

  From the driver’s seat, Ma said, “Well then, Jed, have at it.”

  The station wagon sped into the darkness to the west. The city retreated from view, unthreading into ranch houses, streetlights, and at last the black plains. But upon the generative membrane of Charlie’s kid-dreamy brain, as the actual city vanished it only grew larger still, its doors opening to Charlie, leading onto elaborate eateries, gilded elevators that rose among penthouse pleasure domes, rooftop lairs, zeppelins gliding whalelike in the altitudes.

  Of course, Charlie soon knew that it hadn’t really been New York he’d seen that night. But he wasn’t too disappointed. If anything, he was a little awed to understand how it had only taken a few words to remake a lesser city into his own magical Oz. And it was around that time that Charlie and his brother began to test how far that trick could go. Almost every night, in the months that followed, they made up new stories about other impossible places and how they might find their way to them.

  “So,” Oliver would say, “I was thinking about what Granny Nunu said, about how the Kiowa believed that all people originally came from a hole to the underworld, and then I was thinking, what if we found that hole today?”

  “But how would we know where to look?”

  “That’s just the thing,” Oliver said. “What if the ancients hid signs all over the planet, and we had to put together this great big map?”

  “Like a scavenger hunt!”

  “Precisely.”

  Those stories Charlie invented with his brother in their bunks: all it took was the nightly twist of a lamp switch to absent them from the purple of the desert night, the angry droning of cicadas, their mother’s insomniac footsteps squeaking on the floorboards, the awareness of Pa a half mile away, blowing his Pall Mall smoke at another failed canvas.

  Charlie knew that the tales they dreamt up in those bunk bed sessions might not have been anything so extraordinary, just the usual boyish dr
eamstuff—imagined battles with mythic beasts, discoveries of hieroglyphic maps, spelunkings of underworld chambers. But in their youthful ambition, these stories gradually evolved into an idea of a whole series of fantasy novels they would write, like the pulpy ones Oliver so loved.

  They never actually wrote a word, of course, but over the years Charlie and Oliver would sometimes resurrect the tradition and pledge to begin again. And that, Charlie would later believe, was the best escape story they ever told, the story of their someday writing of those books. Unwritten, those novels were like the spirit world they sought, a complete and better world into which they would one day escape together.

  And then, one night, Oliver really did find a passage into some other land, but they did not travel there together, as they had imagined. Oliver left Charlie on that ordinary planet to write those books on his own, and many years later, Charlie’s exhausted laptop showed the record of a one-man journey through a borderland without end, no magical map to show Charlie’s way to the place where he might find Oliver now. And as for New York City? On that July, of his twenty-third year, Charlie had come to understand that it was much better as he’d seen it from the back of the station wagon, better seen from a distance, mistaken for another, better, and imagined place.

  * * *

  On the night of July twenty-second, Charles Goodnight Loving—brother of the famous victim, survivor of the ruined town, failing writer—was a slender body leaning into a fast walk under the anemic Brooklyn streetlights.

  At the corner of Seventeenth Street, Charlie steeled his nerve to take a quick glance over his shoulder, perceiving some illusory threat behind him. Charlie was that July an excitable kid, his own archetype of the young man come to New York from the provinces to pursue his visions, but after more than a year in Brooklyn, he was haunted by chronic worry that liked to manifest in mirages of doom. A month before, he had felt the nodule of an ingrown hair in his groin and convinced himself it was cancer until, probing the thing, he’d popped it. When Charlie turned now, he saw no one there behind him on Fourth Avenue, but that did not put an end to his catastrophizing. At each intersection, he searched the shadows for the potato shape of a man named Jimmy Giordano.

  And as Charlie looked for the bright cherry of one of Jimmy’s cigarettes in the darkness beneath the sycamores, he was patting the cell phone in his pocket, another kind of tumor, the many unplayed voice mails his mother had left that day spreading their deadly metastases into his blood. Why wouldn’t she stop calling? Charlie clutched his fists and made swift progress along the dim, gum-spangled sidewalk. Down in the subway station, a train roared to a stop, made its electronic bing. Charlie sealed his eyes, offered a kind of faithless prayer to himself, and stepped aboard.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks before, when Jimmy Giordano—Charlie’s gregarious, outer-borough-accented landlord—had knocked on Charlie’s door to remind him that he was already three months behind on rent, Charlie had begged Jimmy for a little more flexibility. Jimmy, the sort of guy who usually filled every silence with low laughter, had not laughed. “At four months,” he had said, “we can begin the eviction proceedings.”

  “Eviction?”

  “But that’s the least of your worries.”

  “The least?”

  “Even if we kick you out, there’s still the matter of all that back rent. We’re talking about, what, five thousand now. Five thousand, it ain’t chump change.”

  Charlie had been the one to laugh then, the way these words, thickened with Jimmy’s Brooklyn brogue, sounded sampled from some gangster movie. Such an insinuating threat seemed like a joke in Charlie’s neighborhood, a place where Jimmy’s beige, vinyl-sided, four-floor tenement was a little blight on the street of terraced gardens and brownstones, where the young professionals ate at locavore cafés and spoke with round-eyed optimism of their careers in media and NGOs. Jimmy Giordano, however, now looked quite humorless.

  “I’m sure I can come up with something,” Charlie said, and his landlord told him that he had until the first.

  “Five thousand you will give me,” Jimmy said, in that oddly Yoda-like construction. “On the first of the month.”

  “Right,” Charlie said. And when Jimmy had then mused in his jocularly menacing way about “any further delays or difficulties,” he mentioned his “collections guy, who helps me out with tough cases like yours.”

  Five thousand: that appalling figure, with its three zeroes, rolled like dropped coins through Charlie’s mind as Jimmy waddled away. Several months before, Charlie had run out of the money he’d saved working as a bar back during his college years, and he had also spent the decent amount his granny Nunu had set aside for him in her will. But Charlie was still a little too delighted by his life in New York not to find some charm in the scene. Things had gotten so desperate, he really did write in his Moleskine that afternoon, that at the start of my second summer in New York my landlord threatened my life.

  And yet, the next morning, when Charlie had transcribed this sentence into his computer, it did not engender the magic it had seemed to promise. Charlie had not worked a real job since his arrival in New York. Miraculously, he had gotten a little contract with an actual, if very modest, book publisher called Icarus. He received half the meager advance on signing, the other half to be deposited in his account when he delivered a manuscript. How his mother had replied when he had called her, months ago, with the news of his book deal: “Oh, Charlie, what have you done now?”

  No fallbacks! Charlie had written, like a rebuttal to Ma, on a Post-it that he fixed just above the kitchen table where he supposedly worked. Your JOB is to WRITE! And yet, once more, Charlie was decidedly not writing; no following sentence came the next morning or the next. Charlie employed his father’s old strategy for dealing with difficulties; paralyzed by dread, he tried to forget his troubles in a self-prescribed course of chemical amnesia. Charlie spent much of the following weeks in a pot-perfumed torpor with a so-called digital artist named Terrance, with whom he lit soggy joints and burned through lazy days on the batik quilt in the guy’s East Village bedroom, Charlie’s pug Edwina producing watery snores between them.

  Back on Eighteenth Street, as the new month approached, Charlie had often seen his landlord out there, skulking around his building, sorting the garbage, smoking his blue packs of Parliaments, his aviator glasses seemingly aimed in the direction of Charlie’s windows, which he kept dark. Charlie knew he could not ask his parents for money. Such a request would serve as a crushing confirmation of his mother’s pessimistic view of the world, her damning insinuations about Charlie’s harebrained schemes for his place in it, her oft-repeated condemnations of Charlie’s book project and his entire Brooklyn existence in which he flagrantly divested himself of the endowment his granny had spent decades clipping coupons and buying off-brand groceries to leave for him. And to ask his father? Even if he weren’t penniless—Charlie knew the man was living on fumes, working the daytime shift at some new hotel in Lajitas—such was the state of things between them that Charlie would rather have taken his chances with Jimmy Giordano’s “collections guy” than break the five-year vow of silence that was his relationship with that drink-clumsy depressive he used to call Pa. In panicked fugues, Charlie ran through mental lists of who else he might hit up for the cash. But nearly every other name in his phone’s contact list fell in one of two categories: men he had slept with and then given the silent treatment, or friends from college he had neglected to write to since his arrival in Brooklyn. The fiction of his big city life was that he was not alone in it.

  Charlie told himself that he was being ridiculous—that the money he owed wasn’t so very much, after all—but the fact was that he had become too afraid to leave his apartment, and he went to absurd lengths to make it appear he was not home. When the need for the toilet forced him to pass the window, he bellied the floor beneath the frame. Trying to work at his computer, he tented himself under a fusty comforter, to hide the la
ptop’s glow. Despite her yelping complaints, he made Edwina do her business on pages of The Village Voice, spread on the floor. And still he might have continued up there, subsisting on a jumbo box of granola, if Ma had not called.

  Charlie had not answered. He couldn’t foresee any way he could speak to her without admitting to his money problems. It had been a long while since they had talked; but then, from another perspective, in the arguments about his life choices he silently conducted with her in his mind several times a day, they talked all the time. Charlie hadn’t answered, but then she called again. And then again. Her phone calls, over the past few years, had established a certain passive-aggressive pattern; she refused to call twice before Charlie called her back. But now she called once more. The last time they’d spoken, her list of Oliver’s maladies had grown so long he’d stopped listening. Bedsore infection, a blood clot in his leg, a chance of pneumonia, hypertension from the steroids—

  “Stop ringing!” Charlie yelled at the phone, but it rang once more.

  “Stop it, please, stop it,” he said, crying a little now.

  She had called nine times and left four voice mails that evening; Charlie felt he had to do something, anything to get away from that apartment and the ringing of his phone. Charlie couldn’t know what she had to tell him, did not yet know a thing about the fMRI his mother had scheduled for that day, but he understood this much, from the insistence of her calls: the likeliest news was that at last it had happened, that at last what remained of his brother was gone.

  “Oliver,” Charlie said, and shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  A half hour later, Charlie got off the subway at Second Avenue, then walked the six blocks of drunks, hobos, and mirthful hipsters toward Terrance’s place. Terrance was not what Charlie would have called a boyfriend. Four months, and their time together still worked in weekend-long hangs, silences that could go on for whole weeks. In the muggy, agitated climate of Charlie’s last months, he had always found reliable refreshment in the presence of Terrance and his moneyed degeneracy, but it remained a source of refreshment Charlie wasn’t at all sure it was healthy to enjoy, like the cool, microbe-laced breezes that preceded a subway train’s arrival through the filthy tunnels. And yet, at that moment, Terrance was the closest thing Charlie had to a relationship of any kind.