Like all the boys Charlie saw, it had only taken Terrance a little light googling to learn the only fact about Charlie anyone cared to know. Outside a Lower East Side dive, on their second meet-up, Terrance had greeted Charlie with the same giddy astonishment that was so wretchedly familiar to Charlie by now, the darkest brand of glamour that his own little part in a widening, nationwide crisis seemed to lend him. “My God,” Terrance said, “I had no idea. You read about that kind of thing on the news, but to think it actually could happen to someone I know?” Charlie shrugged, felt his pockets for his gum. “I don’t talk about that time,” Charlie said later, when, awash in third-drink intimacy, Terrance inquired directly. Partially, Charlie would have admitted, this was just a technique. The trick to a convincing broodiness, he had learned, was to withhold the deepest horrors. To give those guys a feeling that they had to prove they were worthy of entering his quote unquote darkest chambers. And yet, this was a chamber that Charlie would never open for anyone; he had locked those first days after in a safe that he dropped to the bottom of the sea. And yet, from time to time the safe still released a bubble that popped into Charlie’s awareness. Ma’s eyes wild on the opposite side of the hospital’s conference room, on that first night. Manuel Paz’s hand on Charlie’s shoulder, ushering him away from the image of weeping schoolchildren outside Bliss Township on the television screen. The thick, dimpled arms of the other mothers smothering him in the hallway of the hospital. The idiotic, cowboy-movie face of the state’s governor, speaking platitudes at Charlie as he crouched to his level.
Charlie did not tell Terrance any of this. He even lied when Terrance asked him where he got Edwina. “A West Texas dog rescue,” Charlie said, thinking of Edwina’s true provenance: that morning, a few weeks after, the only time Rebekkah Sterling ever came to the hospital. Rebekkah Sterling, the girl he had met just that once at Zion’s Pastures, the girl who had become to Charlie a kind of minor deity, the way she had walked out of that horror unharmed. Her presence in the hospital seemed to Charlie like some divination; he did not then think to ask her anything about what had happened that night. “I thought you could use a friend,” Rebekkah said, piling the restive pup in Charlie’s arms. “Her name is Edwina.” “Thank you?” Charlie accepted the animal out of instinct, like another of the bundles of flowers that Oliver’s old teachers and classmates were still delivering to the room. Ma had been down the hall, conducting one of her endless phone calls with the insurance company, and when she came back to the room, she only blinked at the dog in Charlie’s arms. “A puppy?” Ma said. “Now they brought you a puppy.” Charlie just nodded. There were too many unanswered questions back then, and they had no choice but to accept things as they came.
At the stoop for number 347 East Fourth Street, Charlie texted Terrance. Feel like company? I’m in your neighborhood. When a minute passed and Terrance had not replied, Charlie sent another: Actually I’m right outside your building. Need to talk.
The seconds passed like some kind of lecture delivered by time itself. But Charlie was also a little grateful to wait there, under a glaring lamp, the dull, municipal streetlight somehow making the potential horror contained in Ma’s many voice mails just another of his exaggerations. And at least this conversation with Terrance was a thing he could do, a much lesser catastrophe he could put right.
But Terrance would not buzz him in. Five minutes later, wearing only pajama bottoms, the guy emerged from the graffiti-tagged door to speak to Charlie outside, where he could keep the conversation short.
“I’m desperate, Terrance. That’s the reality here. You know I saw your bank statement? You left it on the desk, I’m sorry, but I saw.”
Terrance, oddly, grinned at this admission. Charlie could feel him recording the details of this scene for later amusing retelling.
“And it’s not even so much I’m asking for,” Charlie added. “Say, five thousand, and I’ll be able to finish. I’ll pay you back, and more. You can even have partial ownership of what I’m working on, like, I don’t know, shares of stock? I can show you the contract if you want.”
“Right,” Terrance said. “The book.”
“Just hear me out. I’ve never even told you what it is I’m writing. You’ve never really asked.”
“So tell me then.”
Charlie tightened his lips, looked down at the sidewalk as he delivered a clumsy version of the pitch he’d long imagined making to some interested journalist. Charlie had rarely spoken the truth about his childhood, but now he held forth about the almost-poet Oliver had once been, the stories they had invented together, the thing Oliver had become, his paralysis, his hopeless diagnosis. Charlie cleared the phlegm from his throat and continued. “For a while I didn’t know how I’d be able to carry on, and then the answer became clear to me. I had to tell our story.”
But the pitch was not going as Charlie had long imagined it. He felt tears dagger into the corners of his eyes. How could Charlie tell Terrance that this so-called book was all that he might have left of his brother now, and even that was slipping away from him, day by day? That even still he had no real plan or organizational scheme for his work, only an unnamable boyhood hope that he still might find a kind of actual crossing place, some way back to Oliver deep in his own pages? That his act of literary necromancy had done just the opposite, that the more he wrote the farther Oliver seemed from him?
Terrance looked at Charlie with bemusement or else pity. “So how many pages do you have?” Terrance asked.
“I can feel this great energy? It’s like something building up inside me that is just dying to get out. I’ll bet you I bang out the whole thing in three months. Four months, tops. Maybe five. With revisions.” Charlie looked down to see he was grasping Terrance’s wrist.
“Right. Or maybe six or seven,” Terrance said. “Or, quite possibly, never.”
“Please.” Terrance tried to liberate his hand, but Charlie dug in, renewing his sweaty grasp.
“I’m really sorry, I am.” Terrance shook his head paternally. “But it’s time to face facts, Charlie. You’ve brought all this on yourself. I must say that I don’t see any particular reason to get myself involved in this little catastrophe you’ve made.”
“You think I wanted all this to happen?”
“All those stories you tell about yourself. They’re all a little—boom.” Terrance made a gesture of an explosion with his free hand. “But I get it. Something truly, truly terrible happened to you, and so now you think terrible things are going to happen all the time. It must be a kind of paranoia, like some PTSD thing, right? And now you’ve invented a gangster who is out to break your kneecaps.”
It was rare for Charlie to stay with any man long enough to allow him the requisite data collection for such a damning assessment, and with a sharp jab Charlie found himself missing another guy he’d known for a few weeks named Christopher, a slight, impassioned man with a head of sandy, luminous hair, who had left for the Calexico border crossing to fight for immigrant rights. And yet, when Charlie had been with Christopher he had missed others he’d been with, longed for men he hadn’t yet met. The Loving Family Curse, Charlie called it, this damning belief that any place was far preferable to the present one.
“Invented?” Charlie asked Terrance. “If you want to meet Jimmy Giordano, you could just come to my apartment.”
“No one’s going to hurt you.” Terrance took a deep sigh. “No one is going to risk going to jail to collect five thousand dollars. But, really, I get it, you need the drama.”
“It’s not just the rent. Poor Edwina, have you noticed? She has some bad breathing problem. Water in her lungs or something. But you know, the vet’s office charges eighty dollars just to see the doctor.”
“Poor pug,” Terrance said. “Hitched her wagon to the wrong star.”
“He’s dead,” Charlie said. “My brother has died. I didn’t tell you that.”
“What? Charlie. When did this happen?”
“Today.
” Charlie ran a spasming finger over his chin. “I just found out.”
Terrance cocked his head, as if to a strange odor. “What are you talking about?”
Charlie couldn’t answer. Maybe it was just that he needed to hear the words to prepare him for how his future would sound, in case it were true.
“I just needed to tell someone,” Charlie said. “I just needed to tell you.”
“Jesus, Charlie. Oh no.” Terrance glanced back into his building. “Hey, listen, maybe there is someone I could call for you? Maybe your parents?”
“Please,” Charlie said. “It’s just a loan. Just a very temporary loan. Please.”
Terrance put a hot hand on his shoulder. “Charlie. We have to call someone.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “He’s not really dead.”
“What?”
“Or he might be. I haven’t found the nerve to speak to my mother in a very long time.”
“Fuck you, Charlie. I mean it. Fuck you.”
“Please,” Charlie said again. “You don’t know what’s in me.”
“That’s true,” Terrance said, his eyebrows knitted. “Obviously I don’t.”
A miserable train ride back to Brooklyn, Charlie fretting over the sunk cost of his two-way subway fare. But out on Fourth Avenue, the humid, halal-scented air of Brooklyn helped bring Charlie back to himself. The New York City Charlie had found was a mostly antiseptic place, a glistening kingdom for the superambitious and the superrich, but a few corners still clung to the gritty charm Charlie had imagined he’d find. Across the street, a Hasidic man yelled at a team of construction workers; a flock of prepubescents hollered down the sidewalk on aluminum scooters; a spray-tanned woman said into her phone, “Honey, you ain’t getting any more milk till you buy the cow.” As Charlie passed an office with a red awning that brightly advertised ACCOUNTING, INVESTING, IMMIGRATION ASSISTANCE, LEGAL HELPS, AND CHECKS CASHED, he lit an American Spirit and commanded his legs to keep marching.
Charlie tried to keep his mind off the silenced phone in his pocket, entertaining instead a panicked arithmetic, doing the math to plot his New York ruination. The math wouldn’t work out, he knew, but he had a desperate hope that if he drained his pitiful checking account and sold off his second- and third-hand furniture, he might be able to pay off enough of the back rent that he could throw himself on Jimmy Giordano’s mercy before vacating the apartment. And then go—where? Somewhere.
And what was so great about New York City anyway? The throngs of New York, which Charlie had giddily imagined since that night in the hatchback, were sickening to him now. Nearly a decade after, Charlie’s own reptilian brain—the instinctual fight-or-flight region that was impervious to reason—still maintained a threshold of a certain number of bodies it allowed into any room he occupied. And maybe, he thought, it was for the best that Pa only ever knew this city as an imagined escape. Charlie had come from his Big Bend childhood, from that state of strip malls and McMansions, with the usual Texan hunger for history, for a sense of a place with a past that went more than three or four generations back, but New York was mostly like any other placeless American place, only denser. Charlie saw that for the ways he spent his days—clicking around online, stopping by a Starbucks for a coffee, a Dunkin’ Donuts for a snack—he might have been living anywhere. And so leaving wasn’t such a failure after all, was it?
On Eighteenth Street, Charlie was profoundly relieved to find no landlord stalking the pavement as he staggered his way to the door. Back in his apartment, Edwina skittered across the floor as he lunged across the single room of his adulthood. He dragged a loose wicker chair beneath a chipped IKEA bookshelf, and he climbed up to reach the journal that he had banished to that high place weeks before. This journal still held the contents that it had for ten years, though its pages had begun to yellow at the edges and its ink had gone a little blurred from frequent exposure to the oils of Charlie’s fingers. Charlie had liked to think about his project in the portentous terms of fate, but recently he had wondered what might have happened if he had never opened that book. Considering it now was unbearable, each vanished future he might have inhabited full of snow-dappled mountaintops, fragrant Asian cities, windblown cabanas on Latin American islands; he could have inserted himself into that self-photographing, backpacking milieu, his old college floor mates and drinking buddies, whom he often envied on Facebook. But, once more, Charlie now carried his brother’s old journal to his kitchen table–cum–writing studio, where he set it next to his computer like some kind of talisman.
He flipped open his laptop. This dread, Charlie was trying to convince himself now, could be the necessary missing ingredient, the alchemical catalyst that might unite all his failed attempts to complete the book. This hopelessness, Ma’s messages in his phone, and the imminent threat of eviction or physical harm would chase him, like a cartoon devil with his glowing hot poker, through an entire draft of a book. Charlie fleetingly pictured a Kerouacian fit, pounding for a couple weeks, arriving bleary eyed to midtown, where he would at last plop the bound carcass of the document on his publisher’s desk.
“I did it,” he now said out loud, like those words could make it true. “I have slain the beast.”
And yet, even his laptop seemed to have grown listless under the years of revisions. The thing took a long time waking from its slumber, threw forth a few flashing glimpses of another moribund outline open on his word processor, and crashed.
“Edwina,” he said, “I think we’re fucked.”
Charlie lowered himself to the floor. Sitting there in the darkness, atop the grayish fuzz that grew in the deep gaps between the cracked floorboards, he sobbed, producing bubbles of phlegm. His only true friend, his stubby black pug, licked the effluvia from his face. But all the activity triggered her lung problem, her breathing now sounding like a panicked snorkeler’s, diving too deep.
“Edwina,“Charlie said, hammering the wall with his fist. He’s gone, his mother would gasp when at last he called her back, and what would he say to her? But how was it that even still he was infected by his mother’s crazy, tired hope, that her news might be just the opposite? Even now, Charlie couldn’t resist conjuring up an image of Oliver (somehow, impossibly) sitting up in bed, asking to speak to his brother.
In a single, thoughtless motion, Charlie did a crazy thing: he grasped his phone, and he pressed call on a number he’d found long ago in an online directory. The number of the only other person in his whole lousy city who might care about whatever his mother’s voice mail contained. And yet, for quite possibly the hundredth time, a robot lady answered Rebekkah Sterling’s phone, asked if he would like to leave a message.
Glancing around the kitchen, Charlie saw that his own upset had so upset Edwina that she had peed a little on the floor. And Charlie also saw this now: this room he was in—with its alcohol and nicotine refuse, its dashed and crumpled museum of misdirections—resembled nothing so clearly as his father’s old shed. In the book he had imagined he’d write, it always seemed to Charlie that he could convert what had happened to his family into something else. Like unstable plutonium, he had thought he could take the annihilating power of it and transform it into an astonishing source of energy. But at last he knew better, that he was just like the rest of his family, still pounding at the walls of an instant, now many years past.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charlie was fourteen years old on the day he first discovered Oliver’s last journal, the same day Dr. Rumble gathered the Lovings in his western-themed office to inform them that, though Oliver’s body might still be there, just down the hall, he was already gone. “Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect,” Dr. Rumble explained. “Liar,” his mother said, and the truth was that word also burned in Charlie, there in Dr. Rumble’s office. Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect? The sight of the body in Bed Four might have been nearly inhuman—jaw gone slack, limbs snarled and strange—but the one thing Charlie could recognize�
��in the vibration of Oliver’s eyes, the ruh-ruh sounds Oliver’s throat made, the endless swatting of Oliver’s arms—was life. Perhaps with its back to a dark corner, perhaps at the bottom of a deep crevasse, but still life, battling its way for light.
That night, when they got back to Zion’s Pastures, Charlie tore through Oliver’s things, as if he could find evidence that his brother still lived. He paged through the sloppy mess of Oliver’s school binders, flipped through his various fantasy novels, felt the pockets of his pants. And there, in a bottom drawer of Oliver’s desk, was the well-worn leather journal he’d seen Oliver toting around. Charlie slammed the drawer shut so loudly that his new pug barked from the next room. In those early months, Charlie’s existence had become nothing but questions, the answers to which he was afraid of learning. Would his brother’s eyes ever regain their focus? Would he ever go back to school? Would Ma and he ever learn to think of a future beyond the end of each day? Would Pa ever stop drinking in his shed? Would he forever wake to his brother’s absence with the nightmarish sensation that somehow he had woken without all of his limbs?
Charlie went through Oliver’s belongings, as if looking for some answer, but as they waited in vain for Oliver to speak actual words, the idea of setting his eyes on his brother’s handwriting was too much. At the bottom of Charlie’s closet was a small toy bank, fashioned to resemble an olden-timey safe from a Western, which Charlie had received as a gift one long-ago Christmas. This bank latched with a brass key; Charlie shoved Oliver’s journal inside and locked it.
Oliver Loving Page 9