Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  With the decent savings account Charlie had established, he and Edwina took over the Brooklyn studio apartment from a boy named Jared, who had graduated from his college the year before. What strangeness Charlie felt to find himself in a place so wholly the opposite of the one in which he’d been born, what loneliness he knew to stumble among the bustling millions, what dread he knew to watch his bank account dwindle: he resolved to overcome all these with work. Once upon a time, Charlie wrote fifty times over, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time.

  Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and then what? The fact that Charlie had not yet completed a single showable page didn’t stop him from setting up a meeting with a man named Lucas Levi, an editor at a small publishing house called Icarus, whose contact info Charlie found on the Thoreau alumni Web site.

  Charlie liked Lucas immediately. The man was as compact and sleekly fashioned as a European sports car, and he was clearly gay, often touching a flirtatious hand to Charlie as he spoke. Lucas was just thirtyish, but he was prematurely gray, husky voiced, world-weary in a way that an older-brother-starved kid like Charlie craved. Over fifteen-dollar cocktails, Charlie hardly had to tell his story. Lucas had already read all about that worst night online, and the guy many times referenced his own fatally shot uncle (a gun range accident) like it lent them some kind of kinship. The conversation, it must be said, continued on to a second and then a third cocktail lounge, in whose rear garden, editor and author let their cigarettes burn to ash as they kissed in a patient and oddly tentative way, as if their flicking tongues needed to conduct a second interview of their own.

  Three weeks later, Charlie sent Lucas a punchy, unsettled, forty-page document that included a few choice excerpts from Oliver’s journals, an introductory chapter explaining how Charlie had come upon his brother’s lost poems, and a seventeen-page speed-assisted “proposal” that amounted to a lot of fussy, sophomoric-academic meditations on the “reclamatory power of poetry and narrative forms.” Charlie had spent two weeks fretting over this proposal’s insufficiencies when Lucas Levi called to tell him that though he could not offer very much by way of an advance on royalties, this would be his “passion project.”

  “The poems, of course, aren’t always great. Oliver was just a kid, after all, and what can you expect? But, framed by your brother’s whole story, they could be beautiful,” Lucas told him over the phone. “What you wrote about what has happened to him, to you all, it just broke my heart. The pages you sent me are rough, but I see a lot of talent here. And isn’t that why we editors go into this biz? To find and, uh, nurture talent?”

  A silence followed, as if Lucas really did expect Charlie to answer this question for him. “Sure,” Charlie said.

  “Plus,” Lucas added, “these rampages are a national shame, an international shame, and we’ve got to do something, right?”

  It seemed to Charlie, the next morning, that overnight he had grown an extra vertebra or two; he truly did walk a little taller. When Charlie told Lucas Levi, “You won’t be disappointed, I promise you I’ll kill myself for this,” he meant it. Charlie even declined Lucas’s later drinks invitation, to keep things professional. Charlie would have walked three hundred miles in driving snow to chase the feeling Lucas Levi had just given Charlie with a single “yes,” the magnificence of having been chosen.

  Pa. Was Charlie also thinking of his father on that glorious morning? In the months that would follow, Charlie would come to see that more than one ghost was there with him in the cluttered hovel in which he clutched his constipated pen. A notion to keep the lights blazing on his blackest nights: the greatest revenge Charlie felt he could take was to succeed where Pa had failed. After witnessing Pa’s years of thwarted visions in his cabin, Charlie could show his father what actual artistic triumph looked like, what it required. He would often fantasize his father’s envy, Pa shaking the thinning stuff of his hair over the award-festooned paperback edition of his son’s book in his hands. More than anything, however, what Charlie would imagine was his father’s gaze rising tearily from his last page, on some distant afternoon when Charlie would sit with him again. “You did it,” Pa would say.

  Often, failing to write, Charlie set off with Edwina for long aimless jaunts through Brooklyn, and when he came upon some metaphorically pregnant detail—the way the pigeons congregated on the Islamic slaughterhouse on Hamilton Avenue, a team of workers soldering up on the suicidal heights of the Brooklyn Bridge, the annual twin columns of white shooting into the sky from where the towers had fallen, the subway sunrise of an F train writing its cursive of light along the grimed platform of the Seventh Avenue station—Charlie would think of his brother, all these sights Oliver once imagined he might see himself, and he’d rush back to the lousy 215 square feet he rented on the fourth floor of Jimmy Giordano’s vinyl-sided monstrosity, hopeful that the especially potent symbol he’d found on the street would be the flip of the switch, the drop of the ball, which would set the marvelous Rube Goldberg device of his book into whirling motion. But when Charlie read back what he had written, he saw pages filled only with pitiable wish fulfillment—half-written scenes of Oliver walking with Charlie through his Brooklyn days.

  “And what about that Rebekkah girl?” Lucas asked over the phone one March morning. Charlie had promised his first pages to Lucas by December, but he had just admitted that it could be another month or two until he had something he could share. “You are sure that she’s willing to be a part of all this? I don’t want to seem fretful, but what you have on your hands here is a love story, at its heart, and I worry that without Rebekkah’s side of things, without showing just what Oliver and she both lost that night—well, what would this book really be?”

  It was only now occurring to Charlie that it was a very strange thing indeed that Lucas had accepted Charlie’s poor proposal, that Lucas’s true motives might have been pity or else sex, and that in the months since they’d spoken, Lucas might have come to understand these were dubious reasons to issue a book contract.

  “The way I see it, it’s Oliver and Rebekkah’s story, really, as much as your family’s, your town’s,” Lucas said.

  But Rebekkah still would not reply to Charlie’s many e-mails. After the years by Bed Four, Charlie knew how grief was like flash flooding on a desert flat, cutting varied and permanent patterns, but why would Rebekkah not even explain her silence to Charlie?

  He resolved to arrange a casual run-in on the street where, according to a public record database, she resided. More than occasionally, he would stroll up and down the same block of Eighth Street ten times in a row. At last, on one otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, Charlie found her down on Seventh Avenue, her arms laden with brown sacks of groceries. “Rebekkah.”

  She turned, and the click of recognition behind her eyes seemed to drain the blood from her skin. It was a strange and vertiginous moment, Rebekkah and Charlie, bound by a massacre two thousand miles and eight and a half years away, an open horror that still yawned so monstrously between them.

  “Edwina,” Rebekkah said, resting her bags on the sidewalk to kneel to the animal. Edwina did her happy snuffly dance, not so different from how she’d greet any attentive stranger, but Charlie was encouraged by the way Rebekkah tearily hoisted the dog to her chest, like some family reunion.

  “I just want to know you,” Charlie said. “Obviously you meant the world to him, and I just want to talk with you.”

  Poor Rebekkah. The way she looked between Edwina and Charlie reminded him of one of the dementia cases at Crockett State, suddenly baffled by the year in which she was living. Charlie considered that maybe he had been wrong, that maybe it wasn’t freedom that Rebekkah had found in New York. Maybe it was just an attempted escape.

  “I know what you want,” Rebekkah said to Edwina’s face. “I do read my e-mail.”

  “It’s a noble endeavor,” Charlie said, a phrase he had rehearsed.

  But Rebekkah was right. Char
lie did not “just want to know” her. The sight of her fazed, unreadable expression right there in front of him flooded Charlie with unanticipated fury. And it now felt to Charlie that the only true sentences he had composed over the last years were the same questions he never had the heart to raise with Ma, knowing what any mention of that night would do to her, the very questions that Charlie now understood had, in no small part, brought him to New York City in the first place, the same questions Charlie couldn’t summon the courage to ask Rebekkah now. What had she seen? Why, really, had Oliver gone to the dance and why had he known to come find Rebekkah at the theater classroom? Though Rebekkah had become like a minor angel to the people of their town, might her survival that night have been no miracle at all? And now Charlie was wondering if maybe, all those years ago, Rebekkah had given the Lovings a pug in lieu of an explanation. “Rebekkah,” he began.

  “No,” Rebekkah said. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I really am. But I’m just not interested in that sort of a thing.” Rebekkah looked at Edwina with a hurt kind of disdain, as if the dog had somehow misled her. She stood, gathered her groceries, and walked away.

  Back on Eighteenth Street, Charlie thought of Rebekkah the way a lover might. The thinness of her wrists, her soft ginger tints gone pallid, the way she’d made chewed gum of her lower lip. What were her days like now? Absence might make the heart grow fond / but it’s silence that sets the heart’s cruel bond, Oliver had once written about Rebekkah, and by denying him, Rebekkah had at least given Charlie this: he was learning what his brother had learned long ago. He had learned how Rebekkah’s silence was a godlike force, in which she could take infinite forms.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Charlie’s financial calamity and Ma’s unanswered calls seemed to have worked on his nerves like a twice-struck bell; his hands vibrated clumsily as he lifted the journal from the table and slipped it into his patent leather bag. Edwina burbled curiously up at him. Charlie knelt to her, kissed her slimed nose, teared a little. Even then he wouldn’t have admitted to the decision he was already making.

  “Someone wants to go outside?” After days cooped up in his studio, Edwina expressed her relief at the idea of a walk in a frenzied jig, and it took him a minute to link the leash to her jostling rhinestone collar. “Just take it easy,” Charlie told her. Her breathing had deepened to a frightening, sonorous register. “Okay, okay,” he said, stroking her ears until she calmed a bit. Then Charlie went back out, with Edwina, into the Brooklyn midnight.

  Edwina’s claws clattered on the fractured pavement, past the storybook charms of the quarried brownstones, vintage lamps burning fashionably through the French shutters, and already Charlie was approaching 511 Eighth Street for the hundredth or two hundredth time. He looked up to the third floor, where he had looked many times for Rebekkah in the softly illuminated windows. She hadn’t answered her phone, but Charlie was not at all surprised to find her windows lit tonight. “Cross your fingers, Weens,” Charlie said.

  Whatever it was his mother had called so many times to tell him, this much Charlie understood: that decade of waiting had come to an end, and at last Charlie was going to do with the journal what he should have done with it years ago, giving those poems to the girl Oliver had written them for. He mounted the stoop, and he pushed the buzzer for apartment number three.

  His blood chiming in his veins, he pushed again, and waited. Pushed, waited. After a time, he descended, looked up into her lit window. Appalling but true: he saw Rebekkah’s curtains part, caught a half-second glimpse of her face before the thick velvet snapped shut.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed her number yet again. No answer, and so he worked the button once more. He stood like that for a while, fingertip pressed against the cracked ivory tab, Edwina pawing at the glass. A different man, a sane man, Charlie knew, would have turned away then. But Charlie felt Oliver’s journal weighting his shoulder strap, and he couldn’t just leave his brother’s last words on her doorstep.

  Later, Charlie would never be able to offer himself a satisfying answer for why he did what he did next. Maybe he wanted to scare her; maybe he just wanted to scream at her once, Why won’t you speak to me? Or maybe, Charlie would admit, Terrance was right: maybe he just needed a dramatic scene, a climactic chapter made of the knotty stuff of his real life, in lieu of that other story he could not seem to write.

  “I think,” Charlie told Edwina, “that we’ll have to find another way.”

  To the left of Rebekkah’s building was a rare New York sight, a narrow alley, an undeveloped meter of space between her four-floor tenement and the long line of brownstones that shouldered into one another down the slope. This alley was guarded by an ungainly combo of hurricane fencing and a tall sheet of lime-colored plastic.

  Edwina whined skeptically as Charlie tucked her in his bag, and he made his awkward one-handed vaulting of the fence. In the rear garden, Charlie stood beneath the black and rust-furred fire escape and leapt up to its retractable ladder.

  Climbing the steps, Charlie saw that apartment three was a narrow duplex; a spiraling metal staircase led from the rooms downstairs to a little garden-view office above. He hurried past the light of the lower floor and was relieved to find the upper dark and empty. Cupping his eyes against the window, Charlie glimpsed a sight eerily close to the one he had so often imagined. A rutted library table, rows of books, albums, sundry ethnic knickknacks on floor-to-ceiling shelving. In a heap in a corner was a pile of musical instruments. Guitars with their strings snapped, a broken-necked cello, a mutilated banjo. He removed the spring-loaded insect screen and, pressing his palms into the glass, received the one lucky break in that luckless night. The window was unlocked.

  Charlie origamied himself inside, and by the time he stood in Rebekkah’s study, he stood also in sudden horror of what he had just done. But Edwina leapt from the bag, doing a rapid tour, smelling at the corners. “Shush, Weens, be quiet,” Charlie was saying, when a horrible, heart-scorching pang split through him. He couldn’t afford to take care of Edwina, and he understood now it wasn’t only the poems he needed to return to Rebekkah.

  And so the scheme, his last plan, this little climax he had contrived to cap off his failed New York existence, had come to its end. In this, at least, Charlie had succeeded, and now he needed only to place the journal on the desk, climb back out the window, down the fire escape, and into eviction, the menace of Jimmy Giordano, and whatever much, much worse horror Ma had to tell him, into his own whatever future. Careful not to make a sound, Charlie lifted the chair away from the desk and sat. He worked his fingers over the disembodied shapes of letters etched into the wood’s soft surface.

  Charlie knew now that he never could have followed his brother, not really. Not through the internal passage to the clamorous, brilliant otherworld of Oliver’s imagination. The nearness of magic Charlie could sometimes perceive there, the plasmatic, brilliant surface of an internal, hidden sun he could sometimes find on the far side of a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and 3 A.M. until the actual sun would rise, exposing a clutter of beer cans, bagel wrappers, and a few pages holding the finger-smeared scribblings of an amateur.

  Charlie wiped his face with the backs of his hands and stood. Very softly, he pulled open the door to the office, and he waited for a long while at the landing at the top of the stairs, looking down toward the glowing orange outline of the closed bedroom door. The air in the apartment was cool and musty with the smell of burned coffee. Clocks ticked and the refrigerator hummed. “I love you, Edwina,” Charlie said, and turned for the window.

  But then, behind the door, Rebekkah coughed, and at the sound of her long-ago human, Edwina flew from the office, so swiftly down the stairs it seemed her legs never contacted a single step. She pawed and burbled at Rebekkah’s door. Charlie heard a muffled gasp. At last the door cracked open, spilling light. Edwina nosed forward, pushing the door wide and revealing Rebekkah, standing there with a hardcover book hoisted over her head, quaking so severely t
hat the object nearly wobbled from her fist. Charlie could not make her face out against the brightness behind her, but he could feel their gazes meet. “Oh, fuck. Charlie?”

  “Rebekkah,” he said. Charlie took a too-long step forward then, losing track of the stairs.

  * * *

  Three hours later, on the fourth floor of New York Methodist Hospital, Charlie lay alone on the sheet-papered bed of an observation room. The doctor had told him that he would be back soon, once the cranial X-rays printed. Charlie had protested these X-rays, just as he protested the blood work and the resetting of a pinky finger he dislocated in the fall. Charlie’s insurance plan was limited to superstitious knocking on wood and the weekly resolutions to eat better, abstain from smoking, and look both ways before crossing a street. But when Charlie tried to lift himself from the bed, a nurse held him back. “It’s out of your hands,” she said. Charlie’s left forearm now resided in a mold of fiberglass, and he understood why people sometimes called a headache splitting; his swollen brain pushed so terribly against the jar of his skull, he had an image of hairline fissures racing across the bone.

  “Jesus Christ, Charlie. What the fuck? Oh, Jesus. Don’t you move,” Rebekkah had told him when he came to rest at the bottom of the staircase. Her fright had still kept that book (an edition of Byron, he noticed) hoisted near her head. He watched her pull a phone from the embroidered pocket of her silk robe, juggling it for a second in her trembling hands.

  “Rebekkah,” Charlie said, his mind a grim montage of outcomes: a squad car, handcuffs, imprisonment, death. “Please. You don’t have to call anyone.”

  “We—we need an ambulance,” Rebekkah managed to tell the emergency operator, her voice weak with panic. “My friend has had a bad fall.”